For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.

Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim.

We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.

We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.

I have yet to meet a man who has seen my true stars.

They say that structure is freedom, and in a sense it is. When you're dealing with multiple constraints, you have to figure out what you can get out of that.

Robert De Niro, even though I've been in two other movies with him, I never really got to know him at all. But on this movie ["The Big Wedding"] I did.

The Lord is first, my friends are second, and I am third.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

But I'd say 'How to Make It in America' is the most accurate depiction of the New York hipster community on television for sure.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.