Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.