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.

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different