“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

All great and precious things are lonely.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.

Sports help us to spread a culture of encounter and solidarity.

Congress needs to make sure families get the help they need.

In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.

Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.

I will be phenomenal to the women. I mean, I want to help women.

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

We can’t help it. Life looks for life.

God helps him who strives hard.