“Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after”

“She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.”

“You will have a story in there. . . or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

“If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.”

“If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.”

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”