We control the content of our dreams.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

We control the content of our dreams.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

There's probably a way to use that great content and to live under the radar now and then in order to reach a new audience. That's the thinking I'm talking about.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

The problem is we need much more moral content.

Part of keeping space open is not to try to choose a form - to spend more time thinking about content, and let form take care of itself.

If we thought it would improve our relationship, we would get married tomorrow, but as it is, nearly 7 years after we got engaged, we are content to wait.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

Comedy is really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Content is often the reason users come to your site.