Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed