Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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 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.

What is worth to know, can only be experienced.

I think we consider too much the luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

Answers to the most bewildering questions can be got only when asked to oneself

I shake my booty all the time! It's the best workout!

I always was a performer, from the time I was little. It was always a natural place for me to be.

We never read without profit if with the pen or pencil in our hand we mark such ideas as strike us by their novelty, or correct those we already possess.

It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.