You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

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

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

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

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