“Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.”

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

Poetry is life distilled.

Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.

I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

It is brave to be involved.

Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

You were never good at words. So I tried to learn silence.

All begins with you surrounding yourself with the right people—the good and authentic people—and unsurrounding yourself with the wrong people. And we both know there are plenty of wrong people in this world.

Every man should view himself as equally balanced: half good and half evil. Likewise, he should see the entire world as half good and half evil. With a single good deed he will tip the scales for himself, and for the entire world, to the side of good.

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

If you could only tell them that living and spending isn’t the same thing! But it’s no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily.

It is just good practice to do a situational scan and have situational awareness when you are out in the world.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

It is well known among physicians that the best of the nourishing foods is the one that the Moslem religion forbids, i.e., Wine. It contains much good and light nourishment. It is rapidly digested and helps to digest other foods.