1. "By itself, reality isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality into meaning."
2. “Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.”
3. “I don't rightly know what's worse, burning books or not reading them.”
4. ”Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a "read," commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.”
5. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
6. "The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie."
7. “The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with.”
