I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

All I wanted for Christmas was a New Years Eve party that I would never forget. Too bad I got too drunk to remember it.

I wanna open a Jamaican/Irish/Spanish small plate breakfast restaurant and call it Tapas the Morning to Ja.

You're everything I hope for. You're everything I need. You are so beautiful to me.

I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

Those who stand on their toes are not steady.

Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.

Get out and about. Rather than going to the same gym and doing the same thing, it's a good opportunity to try different things.

If we do not help a man in trouble, it is as if we caused the trouble.

Toughness is not being a bully, it’s having a backbone.