Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.