There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

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

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

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

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