Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.

Trust firmly in your luck, cling to your happiness, and dare to take risks.

What comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention nor patience

Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.

Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine. His head trails a wake through the galaxy of the absurd.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Develop your legitimate strangeness.

How can we live without the unknown before us?

What can be seductive about the eternal nothing is that the finest day is indifferently this one or any other like it.

Be gful to the man who cares nothing for your remorse. You are his equal.

Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons, and then using the magic and subversive powers of desire to bring them back in the form of one entirely satisfying presence.

People are idiots, Choo. Always remmber that: people are faithless, backstabbing, weak, creepy, stupid, lazy idiots.

For a gallant spirit there can never be defeat.

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

If you hold on to things long enough, they get back into style. Like me.

The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.

If you make a decision to fight for future of your own country you have to consider all the consequences.

I joined Tommy Dorsey at the Paramount Theater in New York as a singer. I replaced Frank Sinatra.

Don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right.