No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the Love and the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risks of living with both arms. One has to embrace life.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.

In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.