I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

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.

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.

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.

Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.

Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning.

I've always loved spaces and dwellings in general.

She’s not… She’s not datin’ the skeleton, is she? How would that be even possible, let alone… nice? He’s got no skin, or lips, or… or nothin’.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.

Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.

Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all, the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity.

A good leader shares information, even if they don't know the whole story. Without any information, people create their own, which causes fear and paranoia.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.