I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald with a baldness full of grandeur.

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

It was the highlight of my life being in the Mae West show, because I saw and did things I never had before.

I interviewed Johnny Knoxville once. I was kind of scared to interview him because I thought he might be a real jerk, but he was really nice, and I ripped his chest hair out.

Rakes are more suspicious than honest men.

Avarice is rarely the vice of youth.

Face front, true believers!

The less the thought of the body, the better. For it is the body that drags us down.