Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Set out time to worship God in your closet, give Him quality praise and watch Him raise you.

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.

I think people are just haters. When they see people doing well, some people, if there's something wrong, they'll pick at that.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

I want us to be as good as we say we are and as others think we should be.

We come into the world alone and we die alone. Why, in life, should we be any less alone?

If you look at my career, I've never gone to a team that had fulfilled their potential.

... in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capable of turning either way.