“Shaw...has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?""Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and all that jazz. Anna use to be the abstinence poster girl, but post-Shaw you could write a comic book about the many adventures of her vagina. It could wear a cape.”

“You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.”

“Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.”

“Have you been writing any personal experience articles lately?" the woman asked the writer. "No," replied the writer. "I've been busy having them.”

“I don't write poems to melt your heart.I write them,so our heartscan melt together.”