Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

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.

The sky sinks slowly inside the past.

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

Beer is sacred business, a mood-altering food substance that may have preserved the human species. To drink beer is to be human.

... still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.

Dharma is another name for existence. It is existence in its purest form.

If beer got any lighter you could raise goldfish in it.

Luke', I said, and immediately added, 'My boyfriend.' My supernatural, doomed, gorgeous, killer boyfriend.

My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.

I enjoy my public speaking. That's what I love doing. It's what I'm good at.