"I did pretty good for a guy who never finished high school and used to yodel at square dances."

“What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit the weaknesses of those who are unable to help themselves and then to fasten some moral superscription upon it. This I loathe so much that I cannot conceivably explain how much it is.”

Source : Malcolm Lowry (1965). “Selected letters”

“You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it.”

“I've not given them (the poor people of Bihar) heaven, but I've given them a voice.”

Source : Mid Day, February 09, 2005.

“If you happen to tell me where you were born, your date of birth and that kind of information, then I'm 98 percent of the way to stealing your identity.”

“Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.”

“Because of the spin-meisters and the focus groups and the way politics is run now. It's run by polls and focus groups. So it's even more true today, I think, than it was some 40 years ago.”

“When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public.”

Source : "Terrence Malick Punched Out A Producer & 10 Other Things We Learned About ‘Badlands’" by Kevin Jagernauth, www.indiewire.com. June 03, 2011.

“Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.”