One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.