“One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.”

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

Coaching is nothing more than eliminating mistakes before you get fired.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

I think if you’re fame-hungry, go out to a nightclub and get drunk… why do that?

Same with golf: pick up a club. But not many can go out and get in a race car and experience a drive at over 200 miles an hour.

My dogs are crazy. They’re always getting into some kind of trouble but then again, they’re my most loyal friends.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down.

I love men and I like to get their attention.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.