“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.”

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

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.

Instead of building walls, we can help build bridges.

For the sake of peace in the Middle East and the world, Japan will never give up and will continue to play its best possible role.

We need someone who will stand up and speak up and speak out for the people who need help, for people who are being discriminated against.

The good Lord has come down to deliver my people, and I must go and help him.

Lord, help my poor soul.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

There is tangible fear in the unknown, but we can all do our part and take steps to help.

If there’s no risk, then it doesn’t take faith. If there’s no chance you can fail, then you don’t need God’s help.