“I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.”

Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.

And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?

Something doesn’t start at its usual time. Something doesn’t happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.

We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

The only music I don’t like is bad music.

If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

You are not making the change because you are a bad person and you are doing it wrong. You make changes because you love yourself and you want to improve the quality of your life.

Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.

If circumstances are bad and you have to bear them, do not make them a part of yourself.

Life is figuring out how bad you want it.

Another solid run through Central Park. Admittedly, six miles turns out to be a bad idea after a full day in heels!

Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don’t like to open a letter that has bad news.