We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

For whatever you live is life.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.