“Sometimes I'm scared of being Ozzy Osbourne. But it could have been worse. I could have been Sting.”

2000s, Progressive magazine interview (2003)
Context: I have been accused of being a traitor, and I have been accused of not supporting the military. Nothing could be further from the truth. The leaders are the ones who make the decisions. The soldiers do not have the choice. I support the soldiers as human beings. This Administration has led us into an area without vision. Bush has no clear understanding of what is being asked of the citizens, and the military is under his direction.

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889).
Context: My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

Source: History as a System (1962), p. 15

(20 December 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004
Context: I'm not kidding, and I'm not being hyperbolic — sometimes I hate this thing I do more than I could ever say. Sometimes, it seems that I spend my days dragging people whose only crime is that I am their creator through the filth and pain and degradation of my own despicable imagination. Where is the good in this? Where is the resolution? Where is the sense of it? If I had even a scintilla of belief in a "higher" intelligence of any sort, days like yesterday (and, by extension, today) would, on the one hand, give me some degree of sympathy for the idiot dieties unable to craft a better universe, and, on the other hand, it makes me grateful I have no such beliefs, because the anger I would have for that "higher" whatever would be inexpressible. And I cannot imagine that there are actually people out there — self-professed "horror" writers — who are trying to elicit these emotions in others, who are purposefully driving their characters on through all the futile, dead-end nightmares that might be devised. I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me.

Fragments of Melissus's On Nature, Fragment 1

On "Californication" video audio commentary - Red Hot Chili Peppers Greatest Videos

2015

On his personal stylistic breakthrough, quoted in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955) edited by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro, . p 354