“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.”

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.

There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

Maybe it’s true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Our old history ends with the Cross; our new history begins with the resurrection.

Civilization begins with distillation

a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.

All diseases begin in the gut.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.