Geography blended with time equals destiny..

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlata….

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface..

Poetry is what is gained in translation..

How delightful to find a friend in everyone..

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Sm….

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness..

When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness..

For darkness restores what light cannot repair..

Man is what he reads..

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those-in the official capacity as well as the s….

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language..

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out..

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that….

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both..

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, somethin….

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I b….

A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious….

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into t….

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them..