I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches copies of copies until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity doubt uncertainty not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material but because that is the way we humans really are.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

France is not poetic she even feels in fact a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people and many cats prefer people to other cats.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media but I would have preferred to work in peace.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come let it come in my time so that my children can live in peace.

Ninety percent of the students take the 'preferred lender.' Why? Because that's the nature of the relationship. You trust the school. The school is in a position of authority.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers so long as they are wild free spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

The snow itself is lonely or if you prefer self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts 'cause they were cooler they had better taste in music for one thing I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!

People talk about mumblecore but I prefer bumblecore hyper-realistic bee movies about how bees really are.

My wife and I just prefer Seattle. It's a beautiful city. Great setting. You open your front door in the morning and the air smells like pine and the sea as opposed to bus exhaust.

I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write I prefer to write in the morning until midday and in the afternoon I eat.

And if I had a preference it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

Sometimes when my mom finds a fun article and really wants me to read it I will. But I prefer to just kind of focus on what I want to do and not really what other people are saying because I don't want that to affect me too much.

I prefer to imagine that my wife a few friends and occasionally my mom are the only ones who read what I do though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic.

I don't drink and I don't smoke. It's a personal preference. My mom has never drunk or smoked. I look up to my mom.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men which to the democratic mind are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Women prefer to talk in twos while men prefer to talk in threes.