“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

To know all things in the Word is thus to know all the suffering of the world transfigured by the resurrection, somehow reconciled and atoned in eternal life.

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal.

The being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible.

Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and “fashionable”) the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified.

So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

I feel it racing through me, eating away at the weight. There is nothing that can kill me now; I am powerful and invincible and eternal.