How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

You must be present in the present to make it a present.

Christmas, as a practicing Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

Stop looking for the biggest crowd, and start looking for the right crowd.

Democracy is "government of, by and for the people".

When you hit the wall, it's how fast you come back.

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.

For me, the idea of being a successful actor is hanging out with my dogs and my boy, down in Venice beach, and going, "I don't have to audition today. I've got a little respite here."

Ignorance lies not in the things you don't know, but in the things you know that ain't so.