Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

True villains are extremely photogenic.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

The human body is not necessarily a human being.

Horrible things can happen to you, and horrible things happened to us on September 11. But if we look for love and happiness and fulfillment, we will find it.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

We are moving from a chain of command to a web of connection, from competition to collaboration, from markets to networks and stockholders to stakeholders, and greed to green.

I'm smart enough to realize that the world does not stop and change because I want it to.

It takes only five minutes to look nice before you go out.

An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them." —Staggerlee

Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.