For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

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.

Women can do it all but that doesn’t mean they should have to.

What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance.

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever

Too fair to worship too divine to love.

I support making sure that there are legal protects for everyone.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

I do not believe that loyalty should demand defending behavior that I find abhorrent.

A bad word that I can't say that starts with f.

Nobody's ever decided what success is, out here.