I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

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.

Fair only counts with people who are fair.

Just close your eyes and enjoy the roller coaster that is life.

There is no night in the life of brave, just like there is much rest in the hearts of the lazy ones.

Prejudices are holes in people's general knowledge, filled with negative nonsense.

Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.

I saw on HBO they were advertising a boxing match "It's a fight to the finish". That's a good place to end.

I was a shy kid with a broom handle that I pretended was a microphone.

Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all else.