I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.

A Romantic builds everyday fulfillment through tenacious observation of daily life and an abundance of reliance on intuition. The result: An extraordinary life lived in ordinary days.

I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.

He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.

People are more inclined to ask what's wrong than what's right. They note errors and faults, seeing weaknesses before strengths. So expect criticism; it's the nature of the beast.

Exercising the right of occasional suppression and slight modification, it is truly absurd to see how plastic a limited number of observations become, in the hands of men with preconceived ideas.

I wanted to observe how a genuine people person, who happens to also be a salesman, handles himself in the presence of a stranger. And few people are stranger than me, so I was paying close attention.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

He recognized it and knew it. In others—clients, witnesses, or sometimes adversaries, he had seen or heard it: A gesture, a phrase, or a tone which exposed unintended truth in the beat of a second.

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"I said nothing."What colour's a blackbird?" she said."Black""Typical!

It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.

When you meet me, the first thing you’ll notice is I have a firm handshake. The second thing you’ll notice is that I’m wearing oven mitts. I like my introductions hot, like my iced coffee.

If a couple has their picture taken at a wedding or other social gathering, and the woman looks hot, her guy could be blinking, chewing, or even mid-sneeze, and she’ll still display it on her desk at work.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]