I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

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

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

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

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

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.