The glass is always completely full-half air and half liquid.
When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.
I think his karma became to serve in nature and not to serve in the world, while I think my karma is to be in the world.
What I need to do is to just deepen my well. I'm just experiencing life now.
The concept of karma is a beautiful concept in Sanskrit. The whole idea of karma is that every being has an innate tendency - the karma of ice is to be cold, the karma of fire is to burn, the karma of the trees is to grow and bear fruit. In the same way, a human has a certain thrust. What I've realized is that my thrust is to be in the world, like in the world of business.
Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U. S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.
What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.
Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.
Remember, your prerogative is to govern, and not to serve the things of this world.
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
One never finds life worth living. One always has to make it work living.