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.

Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.

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.

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?