“You want to be a poet and not die.”

“to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.”

“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.”

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

“If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”

“Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.”