If I live the life I'm given, I won't be scared to die.
Perhaps this very instant is your time.
The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
. . . politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. . . . It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.
If you're ranked number one in the world it's because you've earned it, and I think the only way to really get there is to have that ability and to have it nurtured in a very competitive environment at an early age.
Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat.
I practice on the acoustic guitar a little bit, but I think I have reached the peak of my talent.
You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.