“The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.”

in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

When you make a bet, you’re saying something.

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.

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.

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.

Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother’s milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.

If the Indy Racing League didn’t have the Indianapolis 500, do you think it would have lasted more than six months? No chance.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.

It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

I don’t know that there’s any particular scientific evidence that you could say, more guys get hurt in this offense versus that one, or hurry-up, or whatever, but everything that we’ve ever done in the NCAA is about exposure. How many exposures does a player get?