There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.