The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Friends show their love - in times of trouble not in happiness.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Something like making the NIT would have been a great way to showcase the season we had.

The purest white seems stained.

If you only make fights that you're going to win, there would be no women's vote in America, there would be no civil rights laws in the country.

I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist.

A leader has to be positive about all things that happen to his team. Look at nothing in the past as failure.

[As in the case of] alcohol prohibition, illegality has driven organized crime, sent countless people to jail, and killed many thousands. Repression does not work.

Such is the constitution of Man that labor may be said to be its own re-ward.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.