A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.

Say nothing and just make music and you'll find plenty to say.

Don't write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn't be changed.

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.

One is often unconsciously surrounded by one’s own personal reality

Forgiveness means letting go of the past.

Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It's like a skin or a skull, but you don't know what's inside.

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

Quote: What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?