In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.
We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.
I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
As Bob Dole found out, you can't keep a positive image while being your party's mouthpiece in Congress. That's why no legislative leader since James Madison has ever been elected president.
An opera singer is like an athlete before a match. An athlete cannot overdo anything. In order to perform at the highest possible level, you need to refrain from activities so as to be able to express this power.
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
I was about five years old when I was eating soup in our kitchen, and as I was lifting the spoon towards my mouth, it bent and broke in half.
Nowadays even presidents, vice-presidents, and heads of big agencies are opening their minds to accept psychic phenomena, because they know it works.
I was sued by a woman who claimed that she became pregnant because she watched me on television and I bent her contraceptive coil.
We have absolutely no control over what happens to us in life but what we have paramount control over is how we respond to those events.
My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries dividing the sciences.
I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler.
More effective than giving away half my fortune before I die is finding a way to help people have a good-paying job.
There is no evidence that more regulation makes things better. The most highly regulated industry in America is commercial banking, and that didn't save those institutions from making terrible decisions.
As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.
What is a man? What is a woman? Why are men and women attracted to each other? Why do they desire each other? Love...what is it?
With the dreary season in which we travelled part of the route; with our minds much more actively employed in forming resources for our preservation from famine.
Owing to the difficulty of obtaining horses, Mr. Henry returns from this place. In descending the Mississippi I will request him to pay his respects to you.
It was the wish of the Americans that their red brethren should remain peacefully round their own fires, and not embroil themselves in any disputes between the white people.
The preparations for my new voyage prevented the possiblity of my paying that attention to the correction of my errors, that I should otherwise have done.
A discontented young fellow, filled with self pride; he certainly should have considered it an honor to be sent on so respectable an embassy as he was.
