Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

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.

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.

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

There. Let the gods of friendship and common sense strike him dead.

But it does move.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

See the valentine I made for Linus? On the inside, I wrote, To my sweet babboo." "He says he's not your sweet babboo." "What does he know?

Part of me likes words as music sabotage, and part of me wonders why anyone would waste their time liking anything to do with sabotage.

I don't really set personal goals for home runs or anything like that. However many I hit, I hit. If I'm making consistent contact and hitting the ball hard, then I will hit home runs.

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas.

We must follow nonviolence and love.

I love the ending of a movie where two people end up together. Preferably if there's rain and an airport or running or a confession of love.

And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.