The terrible newly imported American doctrine that everyone ought to do something.

In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.

Blood is that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us.

The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.

The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted.

A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.

For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,That scarlet tree within, which has the powerTo make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.

I have always said that if I were a rich man, I would employ a professional praiser.

Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out.

We attended stables, as we attended church, in our best clothes, thereby no doubt showing the degree of respect due to horses.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

If there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.

Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the state. But when the will of God and the will of the state conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God.

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

Books are my friends, where it's okay to be silent, where you're not a freak if you don't want to get drunk, peel out in the parking lot, tip cows.

The motivation is doing for doing, not [for] having done.