“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”

“They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. ”

“Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.”

“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

“I wish I had eyes that changed colors from blue to gray, and then after I cried, to all the colors of the rainbow, because then I’d just sit in front of the mirror writing poems that alternated between extremely sad poems, to poems about light refraction and blinking promises.”

“You cannot be doomed, after all, as long as you can still see the faint outline of hope on the opposite shore.”