I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

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.

An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.

You wish for what's called wooing. This customary game, where the man shows the woman that resistance is impractical, strikes me as quite pointless.

You guys gotta get a license to drive a Geo, but any doofus with a few good swimmers can be a father.

May your eye go to the Sun, To the wind your soul... You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.

People say, 'Just say who you're dating. Then people will stop being so ravenous about it.' It's like, No they won't! They'll ask for specifics.

People think I am the crazy person on stage, but I know how to relax.

Nobody notices when things go right.

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.

Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.

We have believed for many years, much earlier than anyone else was talking about this issue, that it was in the interest of China to evolve to a more flexible exchange rate system.