“Christmas poem to a man in jailhello Bill Abbott:I appreciate your passing around my books injail there, my poems and stories.if I can lighten the load for some of those guys withmy books, fine.but literature, you know, is difficult for theaverage man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);I don't like most poetry, for example,so I write mine the way I like to read it.”

“I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.”

“Coleridge wrote a poem called ‘The Eolian Harp,’ in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I’ve read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book’s writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else’s writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else’s structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of ‘jewelled’ quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass…”

“It's over with, " Raul said, " You did all you could. You've got this tough-guy image. It's out of date. We fags, we don't have to do that. It's not in our makeup.""What's in my makeup is in my makeup," Leonard said. "I'm a man. I got balls. So do you. I like balls. I like your balls, but I'm still a man and I got to feel like a man. Maybe I'm some kind of anomaly or something. I don't know. I don't get it. But I like a man acts like a man without thinking it's being a bully. I can't explain it him, Hap. Can you?”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Every poet will forever try to write the greatest poem ever written, I have found that this kind of poem can be written with “One” word. And that word consists of a beauty beyond any measure to man and one of the most beauty creations to grace the presents of man. That one word poem is…….. “YOU”