No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

But it's only through joy and happiness that life has any value or purpose.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

I grew up on a mountain in Tennessee, and my brothers and I love to go to The Mountain Opry when we are home. There is alway an abundance of laughter and joy, and anyone can get up on stage and dance and sing. My family also goes to a candlelight service at church on Christmas Eve. It's such a wonderful way to spend the night before Christmas.

The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States.