The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.

The popularity of punk rock was, in effect, due to the fact that it made ugliness beautiful.

Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates.

What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so, you may change the culture and just possibly, for a moment, change life itself.

To be a flamboyant failure, that's better than being any kind of benign success

Don't kill the golden goose.

Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool.

I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules.

Stealing things is a glorious occupation, particularly in the art world.

Try managing a junkie - especially if you've never been one yourself.

What are the politics of boredom?

Some patient dogs had waited a long time for the fatest bone to come, but the impatient had gone to scavenge for the little it could see.

Stand firm. Stand tall.You are a tower of God.

With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.

Our trials are tests our sorrows pave the way for a fuller life when we have earned it.

Still, it's an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.

Yul Brynner's performance in "The King and I," . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

Lord, grant that anger or other bitterness does not reign over us, but that your grace, genuine kindness, loyalty, and every kind of friendliness, generosity, and gentleness may reign in us. Amen

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.