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.

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.

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.

what I like and what I need’s two different things.

The vanity of human life is like a river constantly passing away and yet constantly coming on.

It wasn't going to be our day on the night.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

The thing you do is escape from them by immersing myself in the character you're playing.

When I was a kid, I'd kneel down at the side of my bed every night before I went to sleep, and my mother and I would say a Greek prayer to the Virgin Mary.

Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong.