We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

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

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.

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

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.