I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

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.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Environmental cleanliness begins with each individual desire to be clean.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand.

You are truly as important as everyone else. People's opinions of you will always be irrelevant as long as you keep holding positive beliefs about your life and abilities.

Happiness and success require the highest possible optimism, with minimal expectations. Optimize without limits, and expect anything in particular.

After so many deaths I live and write.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your 'friends

Although I am a gregarious person, I love solitude even more.

Life is tough - and you have to be tougher than life to change the world.