Maybe being an artist is a kind of detachment. You're in the cave, you're isolated, you're apart from everything and it's there you can find out what you believe in, or what is - what is the nature of being, as you see it.

Men aren't called pricks, but women are called cunts.

Oppressed cultures often envy those which are not, or oppressed individuals do, and sometimes those which - and who - are not envy those which - who - are.

Sometimes a person thinks he's attached to one thing and he's really attached to something else.

I have left out what I don't remember or don't know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness.

I've spent hundreds of hours working over words, and part of me, a large part of me, has a desire to do something else.

I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence.