We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.

I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.

Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.

Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end to itself since the middle class would always find ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won.

The key to finding financial freedom is to unlock your entrepreneurial intelligence, work your network and lead the time.

The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

Especially for my father it was a great change. He used to be a socialist and even a member of the socialist party. But then he became an orthodox Jew.

I had good parents. Nothing terrible happened. But I had the feeling that they kind of protected me from reality somehow.

Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

We never cease wanting what we want, whether it's good for us or not.

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls.