Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

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.

Whenever you are being insulted by ungodliness and injustice, endeavor to speak against it, endeavor to stand up against it, and expect to see change.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

Your body will forget, but your mind often doesn't.

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?

The less [government] the better.

These questions can only be answered in absorption, because there are no answers.

I don't think that growing up in the entertainment industry is the healthiest place for kids. The track record kind of shows that.

These broke rappers always rappin bout a pink truck. I'm only happy when I'm hoppin out the Brinks truck.

Beyond the rightness or wrongness of things there is a field, I'll meet you there

Charity opens the heart.