One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

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.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.

It's still a pretty sexist world out there and someone's got to stand up and say something.

Faith is obedience, not compliance.

Most people do not know themselves. The real you is not that person you are when times are great, the real you shows when everything goes wrong. Can you hold on, can you keep pushing or do you quit?

Soup is just a way of screwing you out of a meal.

The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that's happened in American political life.

Faith is having a good opinion of God. That God is a good God. He is not a taker but a give!!!

... and later we'll have action from the men's cockles pairs.

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.