My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

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.

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal

And I don't know much about anything in this world but I do know how to read The book written in his eyes. The way he looks at me.

Action not words are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

No matter how beautiful the outside may be, the inside still has feelings and needs that just words don't fulfill.

In those days, even as a boy, I watched some people that I knew were living way beyond their means.

Man is ice to truth and fire to falsehood.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

I worked with young directors all my life, only young directors.