The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

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.

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.

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

I have only one ambition, which is to be famous.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

That's important when you are running an organization so that the people who work with you know what you believe in and know those beliefs won't change.

We have plenty of money to do everything we want to do, if we do it smart.

Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.

Indiscretion, rashness, falsehood, levity, and malice, produce each other.

It's weird. I feel like people assume if a character is very different than you, that means it's difficult to get into their head or into their skin.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

It would seem that zeal is not an effect of love. For zeal is a beginning of contention.

Retribution is really a stone age concept.