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.

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.

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.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing t

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

So small, so blue, in grassy places / My flowers raise / Their tiny faces.

Whatever happens, we can deal with it if we admit that it's happening and so on. So to be comfortable with what is - that is a real superpower.

The man who is afraid to risk failure seldom has to face success.

Feeling hearts--touch them but lightly--pour A thousand melodies unheard before.

In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.

You're asking somebody who has a wife and is really happily married, 'So, what's your next wife going to be like?' And I'm like, 'What?'