We don't know our own story.

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.