It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

It should be everyone's right in a capitalist system to have some way to take advantage of compound interest.

What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit. As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

The sum of the parts equals less than the whole. Or the howl. Or the how. Or the hole.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).

When I moved to New York, the reputation just followed me, and I am regularly invited to play in home games, by writers in particular, though finance folk also invite me on occasion.

Poetry is God's work.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.

In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.

The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.

When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

You have to understand that in a person's life there are a few precious moments in which decisions, choices that you make now, will affect you for the rest of your life.

Nicknames are baseball, names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy.

I'll never reach my destination, If I never try, So I will sail my vessel, 'Til the river runs dry.

My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.

Mortal birth is a boon to which only those spirits who kept their first estate are eligible.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

Joys as winged dreams fly fast, / Why should sadness longer last? / Grief is but a wound to woe; / Gentlest fair, mourn, mourn no moe.