...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only li….

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world..

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm..

There is no country but the heart..

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time..

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time..

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life..

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it..

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?.

If a man knew how to live he would never die..

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you..

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

This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, ….

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of..

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money..

Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful….

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

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string--or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?--and the string is what we don't know, our Ign….

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what yo….

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write..

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past..