I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work, taking any jobs I could get.
Writing should. . . be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent. . . and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Literally, when you wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning in Havana you don't know where you'll be at noon. But it's a safe guess that you'll either be married, arrested, or in the midst of some incredible transaction where somebody is stealing your passport or paying you in Dominican pesos for it, or whatever. It's a wild place.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
I think that America is an ideal place for the privileged homeless, who are used to different cultures. It's easiest and most accommodating because it is a country of exiles and immigrants and newcomers. There are no walls, in that sense. There is always the sense that traditions are being made as we speak. So you can slot yourself in. If you are living at a distance in society, this is one of the most congenial societies to live in.
In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
. . . catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves. . . I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.
The GOP will be, from now on, the party also of the American worker. If you look at how much bigger our party has gotten during this cycle, millions and millions of people were joining. Now, I won't say it was because of me, but it was, OK?
A model wears clothes and looks good, which is very passive. It's not like a musician promoting a new album. You don't have to read about it.
My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.