How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

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.

You have to grow thick skin and that only comes with time and learning.

Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.

I was so scared of going back to the theatre after Hamlet. I didn't know if I'd do a play again because I was afraid of the power of it.

The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album.

The art of politics is knowing what to do next.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.

Often immitated, but never duplicated!

Every day's a blessing, right? It's all in your control.

You shouldn't separate the piece from the way it's intended. I always feel like words shouldn't be unraveled from the music. They're all linked so much together.