I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

Ever since grammar school, I knew I wanted to be famous - I always wanted to be a singer.

You can be chased home or hit or called names or spit on, and it's over. You have the memory of it, but it's very different from the emotional and psychological experience of feeling invisible, of not learning the confidence to stand up in class and speak.

For me, the food I like to make is the food I can enjoy all the time anytime. It's not too calculated or technical.

In fact, the bandits steal the drinks and assistance provided along the course. Worse, they cross the finish line and mess up the scoring of legitimate runners.

The events of the day's march are now becoming so dreary and dispiriting that one longs to forget them when we camp; it is an effort even to record them in a diary.

I have tremendous respect for Christopher Darden, and I recognize him as an individual of integrity, who did his job to the best of his ability, and I want to tell him thank you. Thank you for enduring hatred from his own community, for being ostracized and called an Uncle Tom and a sellout.

I'm not interested in what other people are doing. That's their business.

I own buildings. I'm a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build. Nobody. And the builders in New York will tell you that. I build the best product. And my name helps a lot.

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

Governments can inflate their way out of debt, but that has consequences, doesn't it?

I'm reluctant to get involved in science fiction, because I feel like I've done it and done it well, so unless something comes along that I feel has the potential to do something even more interesting, it seems a shame to sort of re-live something in half-measures.

I've got a coin with my face on it. It is really bizarre.

Their alcohol consumption levels havent dropped much but their drunk driving has.

There's this common perception that having a famous last name is all you need. A surname may get you a meeting, but if there's no talent you won't get the part.

I come from the New York theatre world, and I have a lot of gay male friends, so this friendship of Will and Grace's isn't such a stretch.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Authority "when abused through micromanagement, intimidation, or verbal or nonverbal threats "makes people shut down & productivity ceases.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

Enjoy your food enjoy your life.

My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.