When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Is it weird in here, or is it just me?

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

All men are equal before fish.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.