Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

I could feel my anger dissipating as the miles went by--you can't run and stay mad!

When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry.

On the light of Liberty you saw arise the light of Peace, like "another morn," "Risen on mid-noon;" and the sky on which you closed your eye was cloudless.

Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.

People say, 'Don't you get tired of people coming up to you all the time?' But what's wrong with strangers saying they love you?

You know that great prejudice exists against all successful business enterprise - the more successful, the greater the prejudice.

What I did suffer when I was young was because I was sort of a hick coming into New York City. I was made fun of by a lot of the Factory people. Even Andy Warhol thought I was a hick.

I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.