The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

Dylan talked copiously, then stopped. 'Somebody's boring me,' he said, 'I think it's me.'

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

Though lovers be lost love shall not.

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

It snowed last year too I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps so that something that is not in the poem can creep crawl flash or thunder in

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December in my memory is white as Lapland though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage rage against the dying of the light.

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question.

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.

Before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

They were singing, Gillette, the best a man can get, with a lot of guys hugging their fathers and sailing and riding bikes. I suddenly felt a long way from the best a man could get and I thought it would be nice to get from there to the best.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women.

It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children.

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

If you factor in not just who's doing what at home, but how much more time working fathers are spending on work outside the home, on average they spend two hours more per day outside the home.

I have never seen such extreme partisanship, such bitter partisanship, and such forgetfulness of the fate of our fathers and of the Constitution.

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.