It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.

We stand or fall by television.

Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.