What do we ask of friendship except to be taken for what we pretend to be - and without having to pretend.
That's what I am. I warn people. Whenever I see and I feel things in my heart, I speak it.
If you live through defeat, you are not defeated. If you are beaten but acquire wisdom, you have won. Lose yourself to improve yourself. Only when we shed all self-definition do we find who we really are.
Keep my planets in orbit, Never forfeit or quit, Move forward. . . I talk with the awkward slang, I walk with the Wu-Tang.
Do the knowledge, meaning: look, listen, observe, and also respect. If you do that, you'll have a strong foundation to build anything you want to do in life upon. Know before you do. Look before you leap. And if you want to follow in my footsteps, make sure you step in the ones that went in the right direction.
Happiness is something you get from yourself. If you're completely satisfied with yourself, nobody can take it away from you.
I think most of my approach to life has been like that, to find order in chaos, to be in the middle of a bunch of things happening at the same time, but find focus. I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it - millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way.
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.
In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.
My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.