The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.

what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a profound connection between human beings.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.