In separateness only does love learn definition.

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.

We judge us by our names.

A leader is a lamp not just a sign board.

He was so damn hard, he could chip the ice from his truck's windshield with his rigid pecker.

Even when things seem to be going wrong, they just could be going right because when you're in God's will, the negatives are part of his positive program.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

I really am a cat transformed into a woman.

Don't wait for anyone to deputize you or authorize you or empower you. You have to just start out with yourself...and put one foot in front of the other.

In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the "cancer" that's irretrievably eroding market economies of private property.

The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you.

A verbal promise behind closed doors, even a statement written on paper-these could easily evaporate . . . .