One is always nearer by not keeping still.

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.

Wealth in money, mineral resources are not the real wealth. The true wealth of nation is the character of her people.

Being yourself is an old myth, being fake in this world of cruelness is a new trick

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

I had fallen in love, even if she was still finding her way.

Faith must have adequate evidence, else it is mere superstition.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

Karma, ahhh. We sow what we reap... We reap what we sow! We reap what we sow. The law of cause and effect. And we are all under this law.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

In this Year of Faith, we pray to the Lord that the Church may always be a true family that brings God’s love to everyone.