The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

It's funny because growing up, when Ali G first burst off the screen, it was something that I was probably too young to be watching, but I absolutely loved it.

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.

Almost anything makes me laugh, especially jokes at my own expense. And I will never, ever admit to being ticklish anywhere.

I've had the big ups and the big downs.

Courage isn't about knowing the path, it's about taking the first step.

We all inhabit our lives, in different ways to some degree. We see ourselves a certain way, and based on how we see ourselves, that's how we see the world.

A lot of getting a song done is booking the studio time. I'm the kind of person who will set time aside to do something and then do everything but that thing.

I've become completely well adjusted to being a cult figure.

The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation is ever dangerous.