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

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.

Nearly always when actors are approached by the beauticians, they try to avoid the dabs that the beauticians put on their faces. They dodge them.

One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.

When people love and recite the Rosary they find it makes them better.

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

In meditation all the fake dull thoughts that you think, all the ridiculous philosophies, the necessities, all the things that won't matter a bit when you are dead - fade away.

There's no shame in being crazy.

If there were one city I should pick to live in, it would be New York. It is a city where I walk down the street and feel anything is possible.

A son of a poor man is standing in front of you today. This is the strength of a democracy.

I have a great deal of concern for any president and the amount of power they accumulate versus congress. I'm a stickler about the idea of separation of powers.

There's still a great deal of bias about homosexuality.