I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen, so that it need never be said again; so that which has been seen increases, changes in reality, in being.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Agnes walked in with a tray of gorgeous raspberry tortes, fruit sorbet, and pistachio ice.

Breakfast seemed to be a good time for throwing your emotions around. Jodie said that at this place emotions were like Frisbees – people just tossed them around all day long like they were at a park.

His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

Mathematics is not a spectator sport!

Anyone engaging in illegal financial transactions will be caught and persecuted.

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

I'm still not good at changing nappies, but I do do it.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.