JOHN CIARDI

The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.

Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

The day will happen whether or not you get up.

Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

A carbonated wine foisted upon Americans (who else would drink it?) by winery ad agencies as a way of getting rid of inferior champagne by mixing it with inferior burgundy.

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.