I cry sometimes because I'm not 20 years younger and I'm not healthy. But if I were I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

Sometimes in politics you think you've seen it all. Turns out I was wrong.

Whether one believes or not religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive it remains vital inspiring great good and sometimes great evil.

It would be great if politics were fact-based but it is not and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution not the country.

When times are tough constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world cooperation works better. After all nobody's right all the time and a broken clock is right twice a day.

One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe and which mean very little.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

In war you can only be killed once but in politics many times.

Politics is almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once but in politics many times.

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

In politics as in poetry it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape sometimes out of one's cultural myths and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

That is to say epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar so the invention itself has been.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Even when poetry has a meaning as it usually has it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Pet lovers know that animals sometimes understand us better than we do and the annals of human sin and desire provide plenty of stories to drive the point home.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity perseverance and to turn around three times before lying down.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace and the people whom they represent with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs urging them forward to war.