Since my house burned down I now own a better view of the rising moon.
Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space. . . to be bathed in. . . epiphanous delight.
I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.
You are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.
I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.
It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.
Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.
When I'm talking to an artist, I'm not being malicious when I tell them their music is wack. These are artists with mad money and fame so why should they care about my critique?
Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution.
WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can't even get into his own Hall of Fame.