“I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.”

As quoted in Saul Leiter (2008) by Agnès Sire
Context: In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.

During a radio broadcast recorded in the UK. (During a broadcast in the Soviet Union, Bob re-used the first section, replacing 'England' with 'Russia' and 'cup of tea' with 'Bowl of Borscht')
Audio recording of radio broadcast.

Source: Nothing Like the Sun

Peaceful Valley
29 (2005)

Source: After Dark

On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, "Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work — giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them — and part of it is cultural expectation — "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.

Source: The Vampire Armand

1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)