“He's a poet, he's a picker--
He's a prophet, he's a pusher--
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned--
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

“No don't you know my daddy told me,
Told me right from the start
About youth.
He said no matter how old a man is,
He's partly a boy in his heart.
Yeah, and that's the truth.”

“Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.”

“He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.”

“He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.”

“He'd never been an optimist. He saw the world as it was, or he tried to. That was a problem, though, when the truth he saw was so terrible.”

“The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong.”

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”

“The hamster called. He wants his home back.”

“Bob Marley poet and a prophet
Bob Marley taught me how to off it
Bob Marley walkin' like he talk it
Goodness me
Can't you see I'm gonna cough it.”