I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.