The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.