“After every war someone has to tidy up.”

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

I’m drowning in papers.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Never throw mud: you can miss the target, but your hands will remain dirty.

My dear child, if you desire to be free from the cycle of birth and death, then abandon the objects of sense gratification as poison. Drink instead the nectar of forbearance, upright conduct, mercy, cleanliness and truth.

The writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

If I get writer’s block – this is going to sound funny – I take a shower. Something about the water feels like I’m cleaning my brain as well as my body.

If congress refuses to obey its own rules. If congress refuses to pass a balanced budget. If congress refuses to read the Bills. Then I say, sweep the place clean, limit their terms, and send them HOME!

What ever beauty may be it has for its basis order and for its essence unity Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.

If they had told me I was the janitor and would have to mop up and clean the toilets after the show in order to play, I probably would have done it.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.