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.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.