Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life?

A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.