Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

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

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

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

Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking