A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Planning your day before it begins, and adjusting your plan through the day, is one of the most important daily habits.

I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.

3 qualities of a good investor

My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.

Some mothers need happy children; others need unhappy ones-otherwise they cannot prove their maternal virtues.

People come out to see you perform and you've got to give them the best you have within you.

I am very happy about Android obviously. I use Android, and it's actually made cellphones very usable.

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

I love women in all their different incarnations. My friends are practically all women. They are much more intelligent than men.

If there is any justice in the world, then eighties rock will never again serve to blight humanity as it did in that dark decade!