America was built on an attempted genocide, anyway. Guns were completely necessary.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

When I get depressed, or anything, I go 'think of all the music I haven't even heard yet!' So, it's the one thing. Imagine the world without music. Man, just hand me a gun, will you?

If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events.

Each one of us is a set of shifting molecules, spinning in ecstasy.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.

The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

Speed is the essence of war.

They have rights who dare maintain them.

If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?

I would worry if I wasn't coming up with ideas, if I wasn't inspired.

I think that my films are westerns only in their exterior aspects. Within them are some of my truths, which happily, I see, belong to lots of parts of the world. Not just America.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.