“Trust me–with women worth the being won, The softest lover ever best succeeds.”

First, then, a woman will, or won’t, – depend on’t; If she will do’t, she will; and there’s an end on’t. But, if she won’t, since safe and sound your trust is, Fear is affront: and jealousy injustice.

Joys, which we do not know, we do not wish.

Shame on those breasts of stone that cannot melt in soft adoption of another’s sorrow.

Law that shocks equity is reason’s murderer.

Order, thou eye of action.

Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession’s phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

Servile doubt argues an impotence of mind, that says we fear because we dare not meet misfortunes.

There is no merit where there is no trial; and till experience stamps the mark of strength, cowards may pass for heroes, and faith for falsehood.

She who means no mischief does it all.

Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.

When Christ at Cana’s feast by pow’r divine, Inspir’d cold water, with the warmth of wine, See! cry’d they while, in red’ning tide, it gush’d, The bashful stream hath seen its God and blush’d.

Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.

Oh, treacherous night thou lendest thy ready veil to every treason, and teeming mischief’s beneath thy shade.

Mischief and malice grow on the same branch of the tree of evil.

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

The man who pauses on the paths of treason, Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

Swimming can be boring. To me, it’s like going on a treadmill.

The greatest thing for me is when someone comes up and says, ‘My son started playing golf because of you,’ or, ‘I started playing golf because of you,’ and all that.

Mr. Bennett, for just giving me this opportunity. I thank you for always being there for me when I need you.

If you elect me president, we will have a president that believes America is the greatest country in the world and we will have a president that acts like it.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.

What’s important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It’s very reflective of my ideology.