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

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

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

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?