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

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

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.

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.

The problem right now, which I’ve been pointing out very bluntly to American officials in Washington, is that the U.S. has no economic presence in Afghanistan.

I thought in my Nobel Lecture I pointed that I was delighted that the Swedish Academy of Science did not quote anything about my current work right now, because the current work that my group is focusing on is actually both the time resolve.

I’m 90 years old now, and my motivation hasn’t changed; it’s the same fervour that drives me.

The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.

You think that enlightenment is something other than what is happening right now. This is your primary mistake.

When you realize what you are now, the issue of death will solve itself.

I feel there is a great spiritual awakening on the planet right now.

People want everything quick and now. We live in the age of social media and hyper digital.