[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.