Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Love is being stupid together.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Every man as he loveth quoth the good man when he kissed the cow.

I believe AIDS is the most important issue we face, because how we treat the poor is a reflection of who we are as a people.

It is a fault, not a virtue, to wish your humility recognized and applauded.

I can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.

Do a strong work meditation all day. You won't be as exhausted as everyone else because you have been gaining a kind of internal power from your work.

When a New Yorker looks like he has a suntan, it's probably rust.

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

We cannot fail to win unless we fail to try.

I would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.