How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.

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 men classify as living is often but the discontentment of making oneself itch just to enjoy the scratch.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

You know, we all oppose animal cruelty. But sometimes we forget that animals on farms suffer and feel pain like all other animals. They, too, deserve to be protected from harm and cruelty.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living.

Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.

Reputation ... is as often gained without merit as lost without a crime.

The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.

A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.

I believe in person to person; every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is only one person in the world for me at that moment.