I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

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 are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

A wise man’s questions contain half the answer.

My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope.

Taste, that eternal wanderer, which flies From head to ears, and now from ears to eyes.

I'm a golfer not a history major.

My books are written with a strong chronological spine.

Do not let the forces of evil take over to make this a Christian America.

A film should be like a rock in the shoe.

He reminds me of a completely different version of Robbie Earle.

Nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.