I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.

A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the rigging, and a small circle of foam.

The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection.

What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.

In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

If you want a transcript of tonight's program, get a pen and write down everything I said.

I'm not letting him write anything. I didn't do anything. I just took his pen.

I've been in a serious conversation with one of my children, and a fan has come up. I've been in a public bathroom and had the hand come under the stall with a paper and pen. That sort of thing anybody can live without.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done.

I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how to solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Caesar had perished from the world of men, had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.

I was coming back from Tel Aviv recently, and we had forty minutes of bumps. I got so scared I grabbed a paper and pen and put them in my pocket, just in case we crashed and I needed to write a letter from wherever we landed.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

Under Obama, our federal tax dollars can now be used to fund abortion all over the world. With the stroke of a pen, abortion essentially became a U.S. foreign export.

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

I usually don't mind giving autographs, but when hundreds of folks with paper and pen start coming at you, it's time to seek shelter.

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

I condemn what happened in Madrid, but it is suspicious. If tomorrow there will be another bombing, in France for example, who will gain power? Of course not Jacques Chirac, but Le Pen.