I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

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

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

Most sex is not really intimate.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.