“And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.”

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.

The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…

Because even a sliver of distance between us is infuriating.

There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.

If what the heart approves conforms to proper patterns, then even if one’s desires are many, what harm would they be to good order?

If you want respect for your past, it means that you have a problem with your present and even more with your future.

Stay with me tonight. Let me hold you even if that’s all it is. Let me keep you safe.

But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.