The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.

What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?