“Prevent your day at morning.”

He that departs with his own honesty For Vulgar , doth it too dearly buy.

Where it concerns himself, Who’s angry at a slander, makes it true.

Success produces confidence; confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which accuracy had raised.

A good poet’s made as well as born.

True gladness doth not always speak; joy, bred and born but in the tongue, is weak.

Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.

Poets are far rarer birds than kings.

O, for an engine, to keep back all clocks, or make the sun forget his motion!

Money never made any man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself to the law of nature, is not only without the sense, but the fear of poverty.

That I might live alone once with my gold! O, ’tis a sweet companion! kind and true: A man may trust it when his father cheats him, Brother, or friend, or wife. O wondrous pelf! That which makes all men false, is true itself.

Well, as he brews, so shall he drink.

What excellent fools religion makes of men.

Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never!

Popular men, They must create strange monsters, and then quell them, To make their arts seem something.

Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I’ll not look for wine.

The world gets better every day – then worse again in the evening.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.

Curse us eh/I’ll make you pay!/I don’t want to rhyme all day!

Colombia is not how people think it is. We used to eat fish every Sunday at the beach. In the town where I grew up, people did not tell lies.