"In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion."

"Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are."

"It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value."

"When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches."

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."

"A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily."

"Beauty is a promise of happiness."

"And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?"

"There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it."

"…it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.” (p.23)"

"It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers."

"Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet."

"Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us."

"An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution."

"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."

"The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done."

"When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes."

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

"I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view."

"The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight,the weight we carry is love."

"Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening."

"We're all golden sunflowers inside."

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

"Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."

"Our heads are round so thought can change direction"

"I know too much and not enough"

"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

"I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane."

"Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!"

"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!"

"If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction"

"America I've given you all and now I'm nothing."

"Everybody's serious but me."

"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter"

"It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now."

"I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild."

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?"

"Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels."

"I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd."

"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."

"What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination"

"With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls"

"To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness."

"Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?"

"To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard."

"America, why are your libraries full of tears?"

"I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision."

"Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!"

"America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry."

"In my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night"