Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

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 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.

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

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

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