“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!

Too few is as many as too many.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

I don’t have any doubt in my mind: I could knock out any man in the heavyweight division.

The greatest danger you face is your mind growing soft and your eye getting dull.

You are safe inside your mind. No one can reach you there.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

But I enjoyed getting sick, I didn’t mind it at all. So in that short amount of time, I did actually go from 121 right back up to 180, which is way too fast obviously. And that resulted in some doctors visits to get things sorted out.