To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, naïve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

We have been educated to such a fine - or dull - point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.