As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.