Believe in fate, but lean forward where fate can see you.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

My purpose isn't to be confrontational. My purpose is to find out about the world and play myself against it to the extent that it is even conceivable.

I think the most interesting stuff comes from people who've just got nothing to lose. You know, let's kamikaze this thing - just throw themselves in it, devil may care.

The love of praise, howe'er conceal'd by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in ev'ry heart.

We understand nature by resisting it.

Bottom line, you're either a risk taker, or your not, and if you don't take risks, you'll never win big.

Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

Retain a calm heart, sit like a turtle, walk swiftly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog

I was once that which you are, and what I am you will also be.

Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing.