Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

What will survive of us is love.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

It is shallow desires which make a young man bold

Among the changing months May stands confest The sweetest and in fairest colors dressed.

No man however great is greater than his people

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!

I kiss people with my soul. I don't kiss them with my mouth.

I've always felt kind of like an outsider, even when I was very successful back in the old days. Even then. I kind of enjoyed it, really.

If you're old enough to be arrested, you're old enough to carry a gun.

Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.