The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

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.

I remind you that I have no faith. If I sought God, I find myself.

You know everyone loves a palace.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

Outside of performing, (a comedian) is someone who is analyzing life, thinking about it and trying to be observing so much. In my opinion, it can make you feel on the outside looking in.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

Now this brings me to my main topic - our military strength - more specifically, how to stay strong against threat from outside, without undermining the economic health that supports our security.

Stuff with a group, stuff where there are other people around, I'll try that.

He was not bound. No one led him by the arm. He got out of the carriage as if he were a free man.

There is a total incompatibility between the joy of reading, a vagabond experience, and the experience of reading in order to answer questions, and explain what you understood.