“The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”

“There is a slight difference between collecting fifty wine labels and collecting fifty pinball machines.”

“The individual artist is a medium for making representational and deeply meaningful symbols of the community’s collective consciousness, whether they are symbols of the community’s religion, love, hurt, power, hate, hope, dream, fables, foibles or on and on and on.”

“...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.”

“There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey--that would be an achievement. But collecting your own poems? What's so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New and and Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going.”

“-at least in the collective mind of the Society.”