...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

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.

The Holy Spirit illuminates the minds of people, makes us yearn for God, and takes spiritual truth and makes it understandable to us.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.

You can get excited about the future. The past won't mind.

But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

I'm not very good at being a wife because I break all the rules.

I don't mind anyone asking me any questions, I've got nothing to hide. I like it to be as real as it is, that's what I call an interview.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

A worker in the rural reconstruction must have: The body of an athlete The attitude of a teacher The mind of a scientist The heart of a missionary The spirit of a crusader.