Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

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 liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

I think I've been asked just about every question under the sun. I'm just really honored that people are even interested in asking me questions.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

My parents reverted to their Catholic faith through the charismatic renewal, so I was raised charismatic.

When the good lord calls you home, the government ought not come get your home.

The most challenging scene for me was the spider scene, because I don't like spiders in real life. Even rubber ones I get really scared of.

It sounds so stupid, so basic, but when you are really in a grateful state, you are like a magnet for joy.

There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.