In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

I can't run no more with that lawless crowd while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud and they're going to hear from me. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.

The dreamers ride against the men of action. Oh see the men of action falling back.

I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love.