quotes from classic

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.

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You can never write about anything after having censored yourself widely enough'during the '50s and '60s, in my case.

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I came out in person to my friends'in my early 20s'long before I did in my writing; I think being in love helps to do that.

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I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

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Many of my poems are not sexual.

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When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

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So many people from Sappho onward were open about being queer and wrote good poetry.

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I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

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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.

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We were a charmed generation. Unlike our parents, we grew up with antibiotics, we hadn't had to suffer the deaths of our schoolmates from things like scarlet fever. Then AIDS hit us.

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I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

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While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

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It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

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I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

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Being in the closet, I saw being homosexual as a deliberate choice. It's got nothing to do with choice or the will, but I was being defiant about it.

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I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.

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There is a kind of inevitable consistency in a group of poems that you write over five to 10 years that end up in a book.

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We are very similar to heterosexuals. Not all queer people think this way, but I do.

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There were real fears of being too open in the '50s, and I can think of very few writers who braved them. One was Robert Duncan, and another was Allen Ginsberg.

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