"I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?"

"To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes."

"The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity."

"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that."

"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."

"He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it."

"So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it."

"I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity."

"William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time."

"Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel."

"She was the Judy Garland of American poetry."

"I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome."