The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making his 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.

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.

Take that your accidental self and build it into your ideal self.

Some of my best friends are women, ' I snapped, 'though I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to marry one of them.

A pessimist sees the darkness around the light, but an optimist looks for the light in the darkness.

Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

The dream is not a map. A poem is not the territory. The dreamer reclines in a barbershop carpeted with Afro turf. In the dark some soul yells. It hurts to walk barefoot on cowrie shells.

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee

They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached.