“I could happily lie down and die sometimes.”

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

There are nice things in the world – and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.

Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.

I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.

You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.

I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood.

Did you ever get fed up?’ I said. ‘I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?

Sleep tight, ya morons!

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

Don’t hate me because I can’t remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

Our body is a vessel of corruption; it is meant for death and for the worms, nothing more! And yet we devote ourselves to satisfying it, rather than to enriching our soul, which is so great that we can conceive nothing greater – no, nothing, nothing!

The Enemy is overcome by the blessed Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Just like dust, we settle in this town.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Everything seems to me to pass so quickly that we must concentrate on how to die rather than on how to live. How sweet it is to die if one has lived on the Cross with Christ.

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.

The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.