Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Seeds are proof that God sometimes packages miracles in small things.

A poem without metaphor is a gelding

Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile.

Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing.

Almost everything I do is related to being fat.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.

You can't smear acrylics, you know, it dries too fast.

I know it sounds very cliché and not very exciting, but if I'm outdoors - in the wild or the ocean or the forest - it inspires me.

I don't quite understand how a generation and a half after the Second World War we've gotten where we are now.