“Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.”

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, ‘Look at it, listen to it.’ Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That’s not poetry’s purpose.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

I grew up in the inner city and have spent a lot of time there and have dealt with a lot of patients from that area and recognize that we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities.

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

When I first arrived (in New York), it seemed to me the most terrifying city in the world… all those big buildings.

For every show that we do, anyone that rides public transit, bikes, or walk, we offer them a $5 voucher at the merch table. It gets people using the infrastructure in the area.

Cities like Portland, Seattle, and Long Beach, which have made these investments in their infrastructure, are seeing not only health advantages, but also a lot more exchange in the community, which leads to better policy-making and stronger communities.

Like every other place, I guess, Kansas City was quite a different city when I was a youngster there. They had quite a few clubs, and we had what we used to call jam sessions every night.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.

That’s immediately how I gauge how healthy a city is-by the amount of tags. It’s just in direct competition with advertising. It’s still one of the last things that hasn’t been corrupted.