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

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.

We're gonna try and bring on all the different aspects of horror movie making and bring on guests and show all these old '50's B movies. Not the real corny ones, the real cool ones.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

If we're not on them, they go back to their old ways.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.

I think people feel starved of nice, glamorous entertainment. They want to see costumes and gaiety and a singer; old-fashioned entertainment - it won't die easily.

Not that I wouldn't have been equally happy to see the old buddies and see it all start up again that way. But this was more of a work situation, and a very good one.

Yippee! I can't believe I made it. It feels like a long haul to get here. I'm so fine with it. People want you to have some sort of breakdown, but I'm relieved to be 40 years old, and I've lived a life.

There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part.

I was on TV for almost sixteen weeks during American Idol. It's at the point now where it's old.

I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

Land began to be seen as something to be owned privately and exploited for private interests, and never was entirely reconciled with the old ideas that land should be utilized in common for the good of all.

I like to take pictures of lots of things: people-such as my nephews, my dogs, and just interesting objects that I see. For instance, I might take a picture of flowers by the side of the road, an old sign or a fence.

I was in the game for love. After all, where else can an old-timer with one leg, who can't hear or see, live like a king while doing the only thing I wanted to do?

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

For me, the great problem growing up in England was that I had a very narrow concept of what God can be, and it was damn close to an old man with a beard.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.