“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.”

“I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.”

“No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.”

“write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.”

“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

“O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.”

“Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough.”

“When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"”

“Industry, commerce and security are the surest roads to the happiness and prosperity of people.”

“Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.”

“If you destroy a free market you create a black market.”

“The scary truth is 96 percent of mutual funds fail to match the market, and the 4 percent that do, they're always changing.”

“Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.”

“And fearless minds climb soonest unto crowns.”

“Some falls the means are happier to rise.”

“Many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak.”

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.”

“Sometimes you have the trends that's not that cool. You may have certain artists portraying these trends and don't really have that lifestyle, and then it gives off the wrong thing. And it becomes kinda corny after awhile. It's really about keeping hip-hop original and pushing away the corniness in it.”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”