I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

...when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.

Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it.

In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn't matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

All growth is a leap in the dark.

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth--I count that something of a miracle.

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.

We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.

We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.