If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

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.

Sin is shameful action.

The only thing sadder than hateful people’s willingness to drag us down to their level, is our willingness to oblige.

I hope I never figure out who broke your heart and if I do, if I do. I'd spend all night losing sleep. I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind. Well I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind.

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.

I am not a sad clown. I am not a sad clown.

That's why we're doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don't have anything against it (Halloween), but it's not our tradition.

Initially, when I was first starting as a musician, I was a very nationalistic figure and I used to believe in doing a lot of national songs. I would always have a national song in the albums I did.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.

scientists ... resist ... making more of the data than the data make of themselves.

I feel the most connected to my art when it comes from my real life and hopefully the audience feels that.