"I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor."

"Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are."

"I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth."

"I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural."

"I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world."

"To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard."

"Nothing happens unless first we dream."

"The greatest cunning is to have none at all."

"I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman."

"Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me."

"All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected."

"Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time."

"I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building."

"A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake."

"I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out."

"Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."

"The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to."

"All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure."

"We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born."

"When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on."

"A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man."

"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."

"Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny."

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

"A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected."

"I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors."

"Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."

"I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this."

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

"There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them."

"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."

"Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by."

"I've written some poetry I don't understand myself."

"I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future."

"When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along."

"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring."

"I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it."

"I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen."

"I'm either going to be a writer or a bum."

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."

"Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool."

"Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder."

"There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds."

"Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life."

"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child."

"I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty."

"I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read."

"A baby is God's opinion that life should go on."

"I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct."

"Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."