“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? – Through whose blood am I to wade ?

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

No one’s better than me. I’m not better than anyone. Whether it’s Eric Clapton or BB King we look straight at each other. And that keeps it real.

I have tons of regrets, but I think that’s one of the reasons that push people to create things. Out of their angst, their regret, comes the best from artists, painters and writers.

Parents try the best they can. They want the best for you. But a lot of their stuff is just their own. If you can pull yourself away from it and not always feel like they’re attacking you, then it’s easier to deal with.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

There is no such thing as a natural puncher. There is a natural aptitude for punching and that is different. Nobody is born the best. You have to practice and train to become the best.

No man is happy; he is at best fortunate.