quotes from classic

Any time I finish or publish a book I have periods of up to two years of not writing anything. But you know, I'm 74!

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As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

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We control the content of our dreams.

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Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

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Keats originated the phrase, the egotistical sublime, about Wordsworth. They weren't part of the same movement.

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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.

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I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

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When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

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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.

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I came over because I wanted to be in America with my lover-he was in the Air Force at the time.

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We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

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With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.

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I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

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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.

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Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

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When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.

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I wrote that poem about the death of one of my best friends who died of AIDS. It was very sudden and very violent.

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I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

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