Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.