“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.”

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength 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.

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

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.

For my heart is always with Him, day and night it thinks unceasingly of its heavenly and divine Friend, to whom it wants to prove its affection. Also within it arises this desire: not to die, but to suffer long, to suffer for God, to give Him its life while praying for poor sinners.

Like I’m a puzzle to be worked out and he’s got all damn day.

[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.

I think the best day will be when we no longer talk about being gay or straight. It’s not a gay wedding, it’s just a wedding. It’s not a gay marriage, it’s just a marriage.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Zhang Yimou is an artist. Sometimes we did only two or three shots a day because we were waiting for the sun.

You don’t have to bathe every day to look clean. It’s just an illusion.

The truth is that finding happiness in what you do every day is so imperative.