"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

"Don't try to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."

"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?"

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been!'"

"Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that crap and just play."

"Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!"

"The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life."

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"