What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
Venice is eternity itself.
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
