A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Gratitude is an act that has to be expressed, not an attitude.

Workers who pick the food we eat cannot afford to feed themselves.

Half the failures in life come from pulling one's horse in when he is leaping.

I don't want an angry song with no silver lining ending up on my album. Then I'd have to play, or feel obliged to play, that song every night in repetition as a mantra of anger.

The most irritating thing about cliches, I decided, was how frequently they were true.

"Evita" obviously would always be very special to me because it was the first major musical that I did on stage and created in the U.K. with Hal Prince directing.

One of the first things we found out was that the Warren Commission never pursued a conspiracy investigation.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

Presidents in the modern era who've had significant assets have usually put those into a blind trust with some kind of independent manager.

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.