I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.