“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”

The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

f we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.

You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

I really don’t like the gym. I like experiences, so I take any chance I get to go on a bicycle or on a hike.

Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

I got a chance to work with Stallone and De Niro – pretty much sums it up for me. You can tell where you’re going in your career by the company you keep.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations – that’s why we got married really quickly.

I have no shortage of material or offers, it’s just a case of what you select to do. But I think it’s realistic that my chances of playing Romeo are now over.

If you’re so afraid of failure, you will never succeed. You have to take chances.