In a sense, there’s a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

People still say to me, ‘What, you still live in Mexico?’ I don’t have to go to the United States simply to find work, and I don’t have to stop what I’m doing. I mean, which Hollywood film beats ‘The Motorcycle Diaries?’

I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion – the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I’m more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought.

I’m also alternative because of Canada – there’s something romantic about being Canadian. We’re a relatively unpopulated, somewhat civilized, and clean and resourceful country. I always push the fact that I’m Canadian.

It keeps me humble just to know exactly where I came from and all the hard work I had to put in to be here. It feels good to reminisce about the past.

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there’s a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don’t treat left nostrils, it’s not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there’s a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.

When you come back to a country that you’ve left, you’re in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don’t belong to that country any more, even though when I’m in America I feel I don’t belong there either.

As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.

A beautiful dress may look beautiful on a hanger, but that means nothing. It must be seen on the shoulders, with the movement of the arms, the legs, and the waist.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species

Why should poetry have to make sense?

When you accept the fact that sometimes seasons are dry and times are hard and that God is in control of both, you will discover a sense of divine refuge, because the hope then is in God and not in yourself.

Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

The only hope of a short war is to prepare for a long one.

The straight line belongs to Man. The curved line belongs to God

Akron, Ohio, is my home. It will always be remembered. Akron, Ohio, is my life.

Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people- and finally I did- on the open road. We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.