For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.