“Regardless of how black the page, he had always managed to turn it and move on to a new chapter in his life.”

“People are always doing things for my sake and strangely enough, I'm the one who suffers for it.”

“If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world.”

“the odds are good, but the goods are odd”

“when they're bathed in blood everyday you can't expect them to rise from it stainless the next morning.”

“The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”

“Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.”