In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.