From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.