“The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer.”

“The bold display of our unattractive parts is an effective substitute for beauty since it duplicates beauty's principal effects, namely the excitation of admiration, charm, and envy in the beholder, who is moved to wish that they too could carry their own defects with the same ease.”

“The world is fast becoming a corporate caliphate”

“I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.”

“The eternal struggle between failure and fortune is a fight not between mortal enemies but sparring partners. So fortune is improved by failure, and the reverse is also true.”

“The quality of a conqueror is to be judged as much by what he spears as by what he spares”

“I rebuke societies that impart to their flowers their cold and rigid demeanour. Flowers should not stand with the stiffness of a soldier on parade but must carry themselves with the relaxedness of a dancer, their arms outstretched above a shaggy mane. Life reveals few sights as distressing as the look of flowers standing mournfully at attention unstirred by the kisses of a million bees. This infection of uncomely reserve is the handiwork of sombre gardeners bred in sombre societies who will not consider their work done till their flowers exude in aspect that stiffness they esteem. They forget that God intended that we mingle with flowers and not merely admire them from afar. But there is a look in a fastidiously manicured garden that makes me keep my distance, a look that draws my eyes but scorns my touch, and that is why I condemn them.”

“In the world of oratory, the cunning atheist declares himself a believer so as to preserve access to the rich fund of tales from religious texts and to powerful concepts like God, fate, angels, the soul, & the afterlife.”

“A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible”

“The manager needs only a molehill to build a mountain, but the money-ger needs a full mountain to build another.”

“There are things to be obtained by law and things to be obtained by claw”