For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly.

I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.'

The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.