For the truth is a terrible thing.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Wisdom is the essence of experiences.

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

The shadows have both been my refuge and my repulse.

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

The weatherman is always right. It's just his timing that's off.

I don't think you ever really know what all you're doing, so you have to act on faith.

The faster you get back to people, the less brilliant you have to be.

Those who cross the sea, change sky, but not soul.

President Bush listed his income as $822,000. You know what John Kerry calls someone who earns $822,000? Not even worth dating.