Human was the music, natural was the static.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.