Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.