Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

All I have is a voice.