Many of my poems are not sexual.

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.

I don't even have many friends anymore because I backed away from them. When things went wrong for me I didn't want them to have any part of my trouble.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

PLEASE REMEMBER WHEN YOU ARE FULL OF DOUBT AND IT ALL SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE THAT THERE IS STILL SOME WHO BELIEVES IN YOU, ME. XO

When you come right down to it, the secret to having it all is loving it all.

The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us.

I think if you have to make sandwiches to get a ring - you should do good things for your man, but I don't think I would do that.

At least if I keep my love a secret, he and I can still have this wonderful, odd, exciting relationship where I love him in silence and pretend he's loving me in silence too.

If you play to win as I do, the game never ends.

Make finding the good in others a priority