“Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?

The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.

I never think that there’s something I can’t do, whether it’s beating my opponent one on one or practicing another hour because something about my game is just not right.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!