Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

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

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

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

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