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 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 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.

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.

Hope is possible, when you decide to believe that what you are hoping for is possible.

The Christ of Theology is not alive for us today. He is wrapped in the grave cloths of dogma.

I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.

Comedy is the last refuge of the non-comformist mind.

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.

I want everyone to know that I have nothing but love and support towards 2PM.

I try to have no absolute nos. I love french fries, I like a good burger, and I like pie. And that's okay.

I am the king of the world. I'm a man's man.

Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.

The way to resumption is to resume.