Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

Dreams have as much influences as actions.

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Paint, not the thing but the effect which it produces.

Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

You are the author of your lives book. While there may be fixed chapters ahead, you choose how to fill the pages within each one.

Happiness depends on each person. If you think you're happy, then you must be happy.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Don't count your eggs until the chicken's laid them.

I feel so strongly that I use a different word in going around that our forces are depleted - they're depleted.

The neglect this implied, the suffering and wasted quality of human life were appalling.

Whenever you write for someone else, you're always aware - sometimes overtly, other times at an almost cellular, subliminal level - of the rules about what you can and can't do.

Love is one of the hardest words to say and one of the easiest to hear.

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

I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.