A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.