“A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.”

“Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truth.”

“A soul that is transformed by principles exudes holiness and a sense of pureness that is beyond our imagination.”

“An awakened imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.”

“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”

“My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.”