A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

I read The NAMBLA Bulletin fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found...I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.