Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.

Has every oyster a different taste?

If I lived in another country, like a country that was, say, an enemy of the United States, I would be more amused than I am.

I'm brighter when I'm not drunk; when I'm drunk, I lose part of my IQ.

I hit Ali with everything and he said 'is that all you got' and I said 'yeah, that's pretty much it.'

Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

Being sixty-five ... became a crossroads. We said, we have nothing to lose, so we can raise hell.

One of the great bonuses of being a film actor is that I get to go to different places, meet inspiring people and learn different things. So all those details add up.

Without doubt you are not sane.

As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.