“Dismissing poetry is dismissing the glory of the imagination. Teaching English to adolescents for twenty years gives me the authority to say, "Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. Kill the metaphor and you kill desire; the image magnetizes the movement of the energy." I will make this clear as I speak. The tax money that is being withdrawn from arts programs in schools will be spent on prisons.”

“You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”

“Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

“If you kill me you're famous,
If I kill you, I’m brainless,
What’s a nigga to do?”

“But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.”

“The killer of souls does not kill a hundred souls. He kills his own soul a hundred times.”

“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"… p982”

“You think you kill me. I think you kill yourself.”

“Imagine being killed by a bow and arrow. That would suck, an arrow killed you? They would never solve the crime. "Look at that dead guy. Let's go that way."”

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”