“Maggie, we’re through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.”

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

The name of a person you love is more than language.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

Personality is and does something…It is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual

At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Christmas story. A young mother and a dutiful father with their baby were joined by poor shepherds and visitors from afar. They came with their gifts to worship the Christ child.

Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

Our future lies in being a high skilled, high innovation, free enterprise nation.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?

Our rest lies in looking to the Lord, not to ourselves.