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.

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.

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

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

I want to wake up ev­ery day I have left to the warmth of your lips on mine, the sound of your voice singing next to me, the feel of your fin­gers on my skin and your heart beat­ing mu­sic with mine.

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.

Friendship means only one thing: you don't create fences around you, but try to remove fences from the life of another person.

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

It's dangerous business, thinking you can make people over.

Be dispensers of God's grace, not controllers. Don't be the Holy Spirit's customs agents.

Redirect federal spending aimed at fulfilling the terms of the increasingly irrelevant Kyoto Protocol.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.