A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

I am deeply grateful to the citizens of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton assembly for bestowing upon me this incredible honor of citizenship. I am so proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I’ve told Billy if I ever caught him cheating, I wouldn’t kill him because I love his children and they need a dad. But I would beat him up. I know where all of his sports injuries are.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

Love is about mutual respect, apart from attraction.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I believe when it comes to love, there’s something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don’t think I have a pattern.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

If you like it you should enjoy it! Moderation in everything. If there’s things you really love, you should enjoy. You get one life, so you should enjoy it.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I love to flirt, and I’ve never met a man I didn’t like.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

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

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

I think women love very hard. We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes, I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

I love our daughters more than anything in the world – more than life itself. And while that may not be the first thing that some folks want to hear from an Ivy-league-educated lawyer, it is truly who I am. So for me, being Mom-in-Chief is, and always will be, job number one.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

I love the sea.

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

I was in Europe and it was at this stage that I fell in love with Americans in uniform. And I continue to have that love affair.

I thank God I’m myself and for the life I’m given to live and for friends and lovers and beloveds, and I thank God for knowing that all those people have already paid for me.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‚I forgive. I’m finished with it.‘

My wife and I love each other very much.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.