“To be a true poet is to become God.I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.”

“Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”

“The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

“... pain has been with him since birth - the universe's gift to a poet ...”

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. "It's perfect... a masterpiece.""Do you think it'll sell?" I asked. "No fucking way.”

“The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.”

“Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”