I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

After a full belly all is poetry.

There were positive things about the church, that is, in the European cultural sense, the architecture, the liturgy, the music, the art, such as it was, the stations of the cross in the church, the tradition, and the atmosphere of awe and mystery in the mass. The atmosphere of miracle, one of mainly mystery, that's what fascinates me.

He says, You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor , your shoes might be broken , but your mind is a palace.

I don't believe in happiness anyway... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery.

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen

My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.