We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

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.

Education helps us to grow wings of imagination that allow us to feel free and fly.

Stick to the honesty and never leave it!

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

The image of where you are going has to be more dominant than the image of where you are.

You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.

See the cat? See the cradle?

Don't look to me. Don't ask for help. Don't ask for anything that you can do yourself

Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.

The time has come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him.

Being a single woman is like going off to war.