If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

Yes, at times in front of goal a fog descends. Perhaps the speed of my feet doesn't match up with that of my mind.

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether...

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.

I think what's important is to give space to the range of human experience.

A man's palate can in time become accustomed to anything.

It has been discovered experimentally that you can draw laughter from an audience anywhere in the world of any class or race simply by walking on a stage and uttering the words "I am a married man."

Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

My generation must have despair. - Leonard Bernstein Ch 40/Dog Water Free, A Memoir

We're all rejected people, we know what it is to be refused, we know what it is to be oppressed, depressed, and then, accused, and I am very much cognizant of that feeling. Nothing in the world is...

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

In the moments between bullets, those in foxholes regain their vision. They get to count the dead, feel for holes. Pain creeps through a sluice of calm.

"I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then...

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though.

We all tell stories - to ourselves and to each other. Some of learn to tell only the most interesting bits.

Cigarette kisses the flame. But the mouth kisses the woman.

We are all in the same boat, boat of life. Does not seem to be a rudder with oarsman. Perhaps my words may find a path, path through currents and waters as we continue our journey on river of life. -...

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone,...

They live in human memory, man. That's what keeps them alive.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a...

For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the...

I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You'll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.