“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

There’s no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.

No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.

The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.

Patience is the ability to accept trouble, suffering, delay without getting angry or upset, I feel like if you can master patience you can master anything.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.