Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

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.

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

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

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