We are most alive when we're in love.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.