Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.