“a criminal sketch of Christon a diner napkin-'Poet Prophets”

“Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.”

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”

“We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.”

“I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”