I Once Had The Nerve To Ask

It Takes An Awful Lot Of Time For Me To Write Anything. I Have Endless Drafts, One After Another; And I Try Out 50, 75, Or A Hundred Variations On A Single Line Sometimes. I Work On The Process Of Refining Low-grade Ore. I Get Maybe A Couple Of Nu Ggets Of Gold Out Of 50 Tons Of Dirt. It Is Tough For Me. No, I Am Not Inspired.

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.

If You Write Well, You Don't Have To Dress Funny.

He Can't Imagine The Result Of The Mission Because He Never Saw It.

To Live A Very Long Time... Is Supposed To Be The Desired Object Of All Human Life. But It Is Not. The Main Thing Is To Ride The Flood Tide... How Glorious It Is To Create! For Those Few Moments Of A Lifetime When The Stream Is Running Full And Deep: Those Are The Justification For Everything.