I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

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

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

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

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.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

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

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.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.