“Poets dream of being archaeologists, as if their lives were sedimentary, like rocks. Poets don't mind getting down and dirty with the past.”

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

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.”

“Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.”

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”