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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.

I find skydiving really hard. I broke my back while skydiving when I was in the military, and for 18 months all my nightmares were about falling.

We had some guys that abandoned their technique and abandoned some of the things that we just worked a month on.

That the rebels or the terrorists used the chemical weapons in northern Aleppo five months ago [in 2013].

I’m a terrible lip-syncer anyway because I have to be in the moment, and I can’t lip-sync to something I recorded three months before.

Anyone can have bad sets. I saw one guy who I really love – I won’t mention his name – gave a set that was really bad. And then one month later did the exact same set on our show and it was great.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.

I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.