Adversity is a stimulus.
I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.
I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.
If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.
My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
