The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.

Of all our sunny world, i wish only for a garden sofa where a cat is sunning itself

I'm doing a little consulting. I'm somewhat retired, still a director of a company or two.

Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.

I grew up playing in an alley on the south side of Milwaukee.

Actors dread working with studios because they dictate what you do in a way that independent movies can't.

He who manages the distance, manages the damage.

We all live upon the hope of pleasing somebody, and the pleasure of pleasing ought to be greatest, and at last always will be greatest, when our endeavours are exerted in consequence of our duty.

No more doth it hurt to say that the body and blood are not in the sacrament.