History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

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.

Tears terrify people more than anger because they attach to your heart and leave angels of mercy to shout in your mind.

True courage is in facing damger when you are afraid.

If we stick together as an American people we can bring down the war criminals that are running our country right now.

Justice is the truth in action.

I have to feel connected before I record and the song has to spark something inside me. Very few songs do that. I guess it's a good process because I love all of my music.

All I've ever tried to tell anyone is that I'm not a black man or a white man or anything else. All I've ever been was an American.

If you want to stay in the business then you've got to be a bit shrewd, haven't you?

Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.