Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

A poem should not mean but be.

And in my novels I live many lives. Substitutes of spontaneity to replace a dreary reality. How I live for those inky black words and kaleidoscope colored experiences.

Parched by the deprivation of your love for so long made me forget what a cup brimming with love, on my lips, felt like. Everything that now wets it, only wrinkles it with a bland taste.

You have to erect a fence and say "Okay scale this."

I'm going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don't, I've written 14 musicals now, I don't want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.

I don't believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

Poor people want to be poor; if they just worked harder they could have more.

Life is bittersweet. Inside our heads, if we're lucky, we're the same kids as we were when we were young.

There are no easy answers' but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Is it because you are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that you listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?