To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

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.

Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.

Electronic consciousness and the transhuman revolution renders infinite possibilities for the future as man merges with machines. This is an exhilarating time to be alive!

Understandably she had a lot of suitors, just like any other girls in China with two arms and legs.

Asking the right question makes all the difference to your outcome.

Drink up my honey eyes, Kiss them shut every night, And be my 'one' all my life.

He (Tommy Pettitte [father] coached me as kid. He bought all the books and videos and tried to learn as much about pitching as he could. But once I was in high school, he never tried to be my coach.

He does not possess wealth; it possesses him.

In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema.

You're totally hooking up with my brother. I don't care.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.