I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Painting is a hobby for me.

I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.