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

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.