Walker Evans said,

I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily. I thought it was a substitute for something else -- well, for writing, for one thing. I wanted to write. But I became very engaged with all the things there were to be had out of the camera, and became very compulsive about it. it was a real drive. Particularly when the lighting was right, you couldn't keep me in...

I suppose I thought photographing was a minor thing to be doing. And I guess I thought I ought to be writing. In Paris, I had been trying to write. But in writing I felt blocked - mostly by my high standards. Writing's a very daring thing to do. I'd done a lot of reading, and I knew what writing was. But shy young men are seldom daring.

I think I hit my peak in the day around five-oh-four a.m.
I had a terrible, obvious dream last night, this morning.
Decaf should be illegal, but it's not. This is why I don't need drugs.
If I ate this orange in front of me, every one of you would be in danger.
Ramble, ramble.

Tuesdays before class. Often I arrive too early.

I read outside, dangling my legs over the ledge of the building. Or,
I bide time in one of the hidden rooms in Melcher Hall.

In another world, I am the star of a classic French film.

There is ecstasy and understanding.

Abandonment and intrigue.

I'm a ready-made star. The sun is always trying to tell me something.

The doors are always unlocked.

I am, at best, ambiguous.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
~Alice Walker

My biggest secret: I am a Talented Marksman.

I surprise the men at carnival games.
They all want to look at me. They all want to turn away.

Replay Me.

- Idra Novey

taken two minutes and two streets apart

The Day undressed -- Herself --
Her Garter -- was of Gold

- Emily Dickinson

Brittany made a video when I visited in Bulverde.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I
admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a
final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Frank O'Hara (yes, again)

There are certain people you trust even when they say, 'Be Transformed By the Renewing of Your Mind.'

Kenneth Koch said,

Another thing about Florence that inspired me was just living there. Every morning after I’d worked for a few hours, or sometimes before I worked, I would take a walk, and it was the most beautiful nature I’d ever seen. The fruit trees began to blossom in March, I think it was, and there were new flowers every day or every other day. I remember that when I was writing Ko I began to feel that I wanted to put into it every pleasure that I’d ever experienced — the taste of plums, the smell of certain hallways, the way the hill looked behind my house when I was a child, the way snow looks through a window. I remember once when I was walking outside my house and smelled something coming from another house; I didn’t know what it was, but it reminded me faintly of the smell of the roller coaster in the Cincinnati amusement park, and I felt a little crushed that I hadn’t gotten that pleasure into the poem yet.

[and, later]

From 1952 on, in New York, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and I saw a lot of each other. We used to show each other poems all the time; we also saw a lot of Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher; we were always hanging around, looking at paintings and reading each other’s poems and sometimes collaborating on works. In my poetry then I was trying to get a very hard, concrete, and shining quality in language. What I wrote was often unsyntactical and, in a way, ‘irrational.’ There seemed to me something in any word in the language — take the word ‘floor’ ‘book’ ‘table’ ‘cheek’ or ‘hand’ — which would be weakened if I put it in any expected context.

Vladimir Horowitz, 1926

I'm all eyes and mouth and hands when I get embarrassed.
Which is, of course, embarrassing.

The sound of my heart beating again startled me.

It's only me.