Poetry is fired by love.

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

Pheromones didn't care about tomorrow. They didn't care about education or employment or age.

but perhaps we should love what we cannot understand

I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

There is a desire deep within the soul which drives man from the seen to the unseen, to philosophy and to the divine.

The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.

Imagination is the most marvelous, miraculous, inconceivably powerful force the world has ever known.

Respect gods before demigods, heroes before men, and first among men your parents; but respect yourself most of all.

I cannot turn down this incredible honor twice.

I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.