“We must love one another or die.”
“Criticism should be a casual conversation.”
“You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.”
“A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.”
“My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.”
“A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”
“God bless the U.S.A., so large, So friendly, and so rich.”
“Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.”
“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”
“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.”
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”
“One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.”
“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
“No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
“We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
“No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.”
“''Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.''”
“You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.”
“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.”
“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
“Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.”
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
“When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”