The most disappointing businesses, for me, are the ones where the people flat-out lie. I had one in Queens where I gave them a couple hundred thousand dollars and they started spending it on themselves.
Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it.
When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
For every dollar you give away, you'll get a hundred back. And for every buck you steal, you'll lose a thousand.
