Thom Gunn

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

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

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.

It's tremendously undemocratic in a democratic society when you deliberately disenfranchise thousands of people.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.