"In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one."

"Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel."

"It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."

"Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession."

"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen."

"Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street."

"Learn from your dreams what you lack."

"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition."

"When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology."

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

"Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say."

"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."

"God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich."

"Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be."

"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."

"If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me."

"Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell."

"Art is born of humiliation."

"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead."

"You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people."

"'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'"

"Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores."

"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist."

"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."

"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know."

"One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell."

"A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do."

"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes."

"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games."

"All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him."

"May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?"

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation."

"Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy."

"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate."

"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic."

"What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish."

"No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted."

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."

"Now is the age of anxiety."

"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag."

"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."

"The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own."

"I don't get acting jobs because of my looks."

"Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return."