The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Happiness: the feeling of being alive.

2. Overcommitment and time pressure are the greatest destroyers of marriages. It takes time to develop any friendship...whether with a loved one or with God Himself.

Excess of everything is worst

I had two thoughts about it. One was I could do that, and the next one was I'll never get to do that.

The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world ... Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

We made it nearly 20 centuries, a bunch of monkeys with PH Ds.

It is the ordinary woman who knows something about love; the gorgeous ones are too busy being gorgeous.

I have too many ideas for a lifetime.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?

Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.