Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.

Watch over Honoria, will you? See that she doesn’t marry an idiot.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life and find solace in fantasy.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.

To those whom the tree, the birds, the wildflowers represent only "locked-up dollars" have never known or really seen these things.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

The mission I set out on in the beginning - to become heavyweight champion of the world, undisputed, lineal champion - you could say that mission is complete.

Winters with strong frost and lots of snow like we had 20 years ago will cease to exist at our latitudes.