I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I'm drowning in papers.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

Such certainty is beautiful but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Its just not easy to explain to someone else what you dont understand yourself.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One cant get lost here.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.