I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

Tears are a wonderful thing. They cleanse the eyes and the heart. Thanks to our tears we can better see the world and our friends.

Failure isn't in not reaching your goal but in having no goal to reach.

Representation, then, is not - nor can it be - neutral; it is an act - indeed the founding act - of power in our culture.

Inconstancy no sin will prove If we consider that we love But the same beauty in another face, Like the same body in another place.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

Never give up listening to the sounds of birds.

Adversity in life does not rob your heart of beauty. It simply teaches it a new song to sing.

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

The most important thing to remember in life is to be kind.