A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.

Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream.

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

All confessions are Odysseys.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

Staying aloof is not a solution, it is a cowardly evasion.

It's a big thing to feel like you're doing something that's actually affecting people.

I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

I loved Carl Perkins, Jerry lee Lewis... not only were they personal friends.