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.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

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

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

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

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