“Mother of otherness, Eat me.--from "Poem for a Birthday - Who", written 1960”

“Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.--from "Poem For A Birthday - The Stones", written 1959”

“I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.”

“The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.”

“I have stitched life into me like a rare organ--from "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", written 1962”

“Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell.”