“I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.”

Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway?

You’re terrific as far as I am concerned.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God’s grace.

Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.

Salutations; it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.

When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

I used to get mad because nobody else would play Miami. Notre Dame would play them, then drop them. Florida dropped them. Penn State dropped them.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again.

If nothing else, I have money.

When all else fails…be a rockstar

He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, “Anything else, Bud?”

The idea of a future without her wasn’t to be borne. She had by some mysterious metamorphosis become more beautiful than anyone else he had ever encountered.

I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I’ll never be anything else.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren’t watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.