We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

Unhappy poor people at least have the fantasy that money will make them happy

As I love the name of honour more than I fear death.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Black men struggle with masculinity so much. The idea that we must always be strong really presses us all down - it keeps us from growing.

It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge.

I have never had a great love of the music business, I never have.

A window of opportunity for me usually involves a rock.

Mitch”, but then reattach it and call it “Mitch-all-together.

Every tragedy of the human experience can be attributed to one human decision - the decision to withdraw from each other.

The biggest disease in North America is busyness.