“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

You know, I don’t only play for the record books.

He who learns, and makes no use of his learning, is a beast of burden with a load of books. Does the ass comprehend whether he carries on his back a library or a bundle of faggots?

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Fatherhood is the best thing I ever did. It changes your perspective. You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is really the most extraordinary thing I have taken on.

So I be written in the Book of Love. I do not care about that Book Above. Erase my name, or write it as you will. So I be written in the Book of Love.

We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.

A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.