The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.