Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.

I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.