Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.

I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.

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

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.

T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.