I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

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.

I am the shade. Through the dolent city, i flee. Through the eternal woe, i take flight..

I hate cops. You're either a cop or a reporter. And I hate cops and newspapermen.

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.

I love reading epic fantasies and big fat books and so I really wanted to write one. I think you always write what you want to read.

Death always waits. The door of the hearse is never closed.

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

The soul of the world is nourished by people's Happiness.

While strength and years permit, endure labor; soon bent old age will come with silent foot. [Lat., Dum vires annique sinunt, tolerate labores. Jam veniet tacito curva senecta pede.]

The heathen spirit is wingless. It cannot lift itself to heights from which the totality of being is visible, and it therefore loses itself in details.

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.