“Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.”

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.

You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business.

I’m good at reading people.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.

Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

I’ve also built my own business, and obviously it’s a brand that I’ve built and it’s wholly owned by me and something that certainly my experience observing him and working with him and for him has informed how I make business decisions around my brand. But it’s my company.

The real power behind whatever success I have now was something I found within myself – something that’s in all of us, I think, a little piece of God just waiting to be discovered.

If you’re paid before you walk on the court, what’s the point in playing as if your life depended on it?

A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.

I need to do it for me and you need to do it for you- because we are reason enough all on our own.

An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.