A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Art is born of humiliation.