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 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 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.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Life's situations are like a set of cards in your hands.You cannot change the cards, but you can surely play with them in your own unique way.

So what oppresses and scares us? It is our own thoughts, obviously, What overwhelms people when they are about to leaves friends, family, old haunts and their accustomed way of life? Thoughts.

When you become a parent, it's not all about you anymore.

Nobody will be able to forgive me but myself.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

I don't think there is any franchise more powerful than ours around securing the consumer experience and we will not concede that to anyone including Microsoft.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

You don't need a reason to divorce someone you can't stand.

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

China has set its cultural industries as pillar industries.