The only way to love a person is...by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. For by doing this, you keep the god and the poet alive and make it flourish.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

While ignorance might be bliss, apathy can be deadly.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think...

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them.

Life is full of banana skins. You slip, you carry on.

There are no eyes so sharp as the eyes of hatred.

Using tax payers' money to provide liquidity to Wall Street so that the country wouldn't head into a depression was the right decision, in my judgment.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

Disgust is intuitive microbiology