I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

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.

Nothing could be given birth to without solitude.

An essential part of teachingis to show how to enjoy learning.

The real female should be partly male and the real male should be partly female anyway.

We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.

Few people who marry plan for their marriages to fail, but neither do they specifically plan for success.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.

Go pump some neurons. Expand your craniums

To gain riches is wise; to pay for riches with happiness is foolish.