...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

Our society routinely steals from the future.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

i never begin my writings with talent. i begin them with strong emotions and liquor. they finish with talent.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

Don't postpone joy until you have learned all of your lessons. Joy is your lesson.

You love only those who deserve it.

Being born in New York City, tends to lead to big expectations, expectations that I only started to realize after I had left.

Luck is being in the right place at the right time, but location and timing are to some extent under our control.

When I first heard Elvis perform "Bridge Over Trouble Water" it was unbelivable,and I thought to myself, how the hell can I compete with that?

When we die, no one remembers us for what we weighed. Our weight isn't etched into our headstones.