Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.

Bald is the new black!

... the economic advantages of sobriety have never been doubtful.

No man's body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

America's craft brewers know that beer, not wine, is the best beverage for accompanying a good meal.

For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: "Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison."

To win that war [with radical Islamic extremists] we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out unscathed or scathed.