“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

“It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad.”

“In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”

“Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”

“People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don't think that's true at all. What's cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit suicide.”