It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.

The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?

Character is destiny

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

More and more of our imports are coming from overseas

I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.

I'm politically on the left, no question about it. I oppose sweatshops, I oppose exploitation of labour in the third world.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

If you go and watch the way the primitive tribes live, you will know what work is in relation to celebration. They work the whole day so they can sing and dance with abandon at night.

News is something that happens that matters to you, which is not most of what we watch on television.