"I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts."

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."

"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

"Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."

"Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church."

"America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing."

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

"America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?"

"Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh."

"The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction."

"The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive."

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

"Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels."

"I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator."

"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."