Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Salute to the Smiling Faces of the 21st Century.

I bet the pill is harder to get than drugs--which shows how screwed up this world really is!

My uncle is a Southern planter. He's an undertaker in Alabama.

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering

Nothing else matters, except that I have fun, and I'm still having fun.

In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many.

It is in times of crisis that good leaders emerge.

Having to be nice all the time is exhausting and boring, but to play someone who just has that under layer of unhappiness, you know that it comes from someplace.

Everybody has a secret and everybody has problems.

When you're younger, you feel like work is work and relationships are supposed to be easy. As you get older, you realize you have to work at relationships to make them sustainable.