If a man knew how to live he would never die.

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.

I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.

I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.

Only one book is worth reading: the heart.

William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.

Dynasty was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than waiting around like a library book waiting to be loaned out.

This hiatus coming up I'm looking at a comedy because I need the balance.

Unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.

You wonder and you wonder until you wander out into Infinity, where - if it is to be found anywhere - Truth really exists.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

The best designs of all are organic, evolving from the subtleties of the ground they inhabit.