Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Anyone who takes the time to be kind is beaut

You see, people are everywhere. They are everything. No matter who we are, or what we do, people are involved in our lives. If those people are poisonous, our lives will be poisonous also.

No one feels good at four in the morning.If ants feel good at four in the morning—three cheers for the ants.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

Motown was about music for all people – white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.

You can't really be too calculated about everything in life.

Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.

As an actor, when you walk into a room to audition, you get five minutes with a casting director, who doesn't even look at you, most of the time.