“I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. Confused people can make no clear demands.”

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later.

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering.

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

A great many of us have confused change with progress.

In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I’m a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive.

I’m confused. Really, really confused.

If I had one day when I didn’t have to be all confused and didn’t have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?