An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Honest to god, Clare, you act like the dress is more important than you being shot!”Of course it is! It’s a Versace, you idiot! Bring help! I’m going to save this dress at all costs.” - Sam to Clare

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

There's more well-known artists who aren't making as good songs as people who are just coming out of nowhere. That seems to be more typical in the last few years than ever.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

Richard Nixon will always go down as a failure because of one stupid, moral - and that goes back to that last chapter, on principles.

I think age, if you are healthy, I think age is largely a number. My mother lived to be 101. So I'm planning on another quarter century.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.