Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Art is born of humiliation.
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.
Now is the age of anxiety.