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.

He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

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

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.