I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

You’re a lady. It’s written all over you, but the West doesn’t forgive any woman-unless she’s got a man.

Better to wear out than to rust out.

To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.

I'm happy if everybody else is. I'm a big brother, the oldest. If you're happy and I'm not, I'm cool with that. If I'm happy and you're not, I'm sad.

Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?

Courage frees us from the fears that would rob us of life itself.

The factor that makes people extremely vulnerable to enslavement is the lack of the rule of law.

I don't care about convincing the people who think I'm naive or an idiot. I'm interested in how do I inspire the people who are open-minded that there's a different way of seeing the world.

Richard Lloyd of Television is one of my favorite guitarists. His mentor was Jimi Hendrix when he was just 14. Jimi was always pounding everything he knew into that kid.