If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

The truth is always multiplex.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

That's why it's called a practice. We have to practice a practice if it is to be of value.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

There is madness in every single being, is there not?

Clouds and darkness surround us, yet Heaven is just, and the day of triumph will surely come, when justice and truth will be vindicated.

Because A Walk To Remember had come out and it had made money and I got a lot of congratulations at that time as it happens out there.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.

I have been taking my daily walk round the island, and visited the sugar mill and the threshing mill again.

In L.A. you hear all these stories of people being filmed in their own homes through their windows. I think that is so scary.

Stability can be a good thing, but it can also lead to apathy. I don't want to set that example for my children. I want them to believe in their dreams and to go after them. You do that by example.