Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?

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 tear is the language of the soul and the voice of the feeling.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

I'm easy to get along with, and intolerant.

It is the inescapable duty of management to fire incompetent people.

There is no threshold level of fine particle pollution below which health risk reductions are not achieved by reduced exposure.

Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

To me, one of the main things that a director does is create the tone of his movie.

Whatever else is happening, things are better in the sun.

Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive.