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

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.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

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

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

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

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.