“I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”

“I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.”

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."”

“I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”

“I don't want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard.
I just want someone
that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.”

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

“I want to make a poem of my life.”

“Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry;
Who wishes to understand the poet
Must go to the poet's land.”

“I want to reconcile myself with heaven,
I want to love, I want to pray,
I want to believe in good.”

“I want to believe there is a somebody out there for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.”