When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive.

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment.

Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom, which is the state of perpetual wonder.

Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.

The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.

Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

Anarchy and Liberty are synonymous. Anything less is merely gradient levels of slavery.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

Try to keep them, poet, those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled. Put them, half-hidden, in your lines.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

The race we are really in is the race against sin, and surely envy is one of the most universal of those.

Our nature as sensitive beings is far too complex to break apart, re-examine and reshape in a poem.

When I make a new movie, I always get stuck with, "That's not an Oliver Stone film." But I don't know what to do about that except just move on.

As a musician, I've accomplished what I hoped to accomplish.

That is the charm of the map. It represents the other side of the horizon where everything is possible.

Some of the very greatest gifts bring an inevitable downside which you cannot "cure" without curing the gift at the same time.