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 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.

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.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

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.

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

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.

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!

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

We control the content of our dreams.

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.

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

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.

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.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil.

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on.

From the Bush Administration to the 9-11 Commission, there is an urgent and universally recognized need to change the broken formula through which Homeland Security grant money currently is allocated to our first responders.

But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.

I truly don't have any formula for the choices I make.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

My guess is that if they now choose to change of director for every other film, it's just because you can't really change the formula, you can merely try to film it your way.

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure - which is: Try to please everybody.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

If someone said to me that you can have three wishes, my first would have been to get into racing, my second to be in Formula 1, my third to drive for Ferrari.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

In sport there is never any moment that is the same as the other. I have been in Formula One for 12 years, and out of that I had one year with the perfect car.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally.