Poetry is God's work.

It should be everyone's right in a capitalist system to have some way to take advantage of compound interest.

What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit. As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

The sum of the parts equals less than the whole. Or the howl. Or the how. Or the hole.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).

It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

When I moved to New York, the reputation just followed me, and I am regularly invited to play in home games, by writers in particular, though finance folk also invite me on occasion.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.

Dr. Beall gave him the first shot, followed closely by the second.He said, "I'll check for a heartbeat."I said, "You don't need to. I can see it in his eyes."Dewey was gone.

I grew up a dreamer, lonely, one foot on the earth, the other on the moon.

Selfishness is the only real atheism aspiration unselfishness the only real religion.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

The death of Jesus is the pivotal event of human history and everything needs to be understood in light of that.

The dreadful cocksureness that is characteristic of scientists in bulk is not only quite foreign to the spirit of true science, it is not even justified by a superficial view.

And it is very sexy as well: somebody says I'm taking you on a surprise date, you don't know where you are going and you can't see and then you put your hand out and there is a tiger. Amazing.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

There speaks the man of truly noble ways, Who will not listen to the words of praise. In modesty averse, and with deaf ears, He acts as though the others were his peers.

If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.