Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

People can find patterns in all kinds of random events. It's called apophenia. It's the tendency we humans have to find meaning in disconnected information.

Live with purpose. Don't let people or things around you get you down.

You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.

In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.

Objectivity and presence of mind are essential in such positions where sacrificial temptations are not always resistable.

I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.

Use a make-up table with everything close at hand and don't rush; otherwise you'll look like a patchwork quilt.

No god ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time - nor ever will.

I don't like guys my age because they are normally either married or divorced and grumpy, fat and balding.

First, think. Second, believe. Third, dream.And finally, dream.