The past is always a rebuke to the present.

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.

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.

For me, I am still very happy to be able to do stage design as it's an opportunity to express the extreme.

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.

Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.

Once you encourage the thought of compassion in your mind, once it becomes active, then your attitude towards others changes automatically.

Pay, pay anything rather than go to law.

Physically, I feel extremely well, perhaps fitter than ever.

I think it's naïve to think white people aren't singing along directly!

When one of us says 'look, there is nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see'.

Plant a memory, plant a tree, do it today for tomorrow.