Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.

I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.

These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.

We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

Southern California where the American Dream came too true.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk.

Annihilation is an absurdity in terms.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.