It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.