As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease. And boldness is the root of beauty. Which draws us together.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.

No bad man can be a good poet.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

The whole wide world is a cathedral I stand inside the air is calm And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

Farewell my great one my own farewell my pride farewell my swift deep dear river how I loved your daylong splashing how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

My singing is my hobby. It's me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

Writing novels is the most exciting.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.

Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me.

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

And that's what I've learned too: writing is key.