The beauty of the Catholic church is that it has a sacramental structure that can hold its own with the best out of any tradition. It has a mystical system and content that can hold its own with the best out of Tibet… its an amazing tradition, but I think you need to be critical.
I Think
I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times – and this, I think, is a sense you develop – I can tell that the line wants to continue.
I think the end is endless. It’s either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it’s totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn’t understand it.
I don’t know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it’s there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I think that looking forward it’s easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
So I think one can say on empirical grounds – not because of some philosophical principle – that you can’t have democracy unless you have a market economy.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
There is far more misunderstanding of Islam than there is, I think, of the other religions of the world. So many things are said of it by those who do not belong to that faith.
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.