I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.

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.

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

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

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.

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