who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

Fortunately art is a community effort—a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks ... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries.... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!