He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

It was not designed for me to be 35 and still doing the same thing. But in another sense, it's like I've had an extended adolescence. It helps that I look young, too.

I was a weekend drinker...I'd start on Saturday, end on Friday...thought I was controlling it...but I don't drink any more.

We have to get a lot tougher if we're going to win this war [with ISIS]. If we're not going to be tougher, we're never going to win this war. This is only going to get worse.

When you become very ill - raise your head. You will definitely see the sunlight.

Open to others as you would like them to open to you.

The origin of each story is unique.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.

Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.