There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily
If I'm around spiders, my fear isn't so much the spider, but my fear is that I'm somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.
What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.
I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year. "
I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.
On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.
What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?
What are eight million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?
When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.