...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. 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 selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

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.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

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

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