I was never really a character actor - I was a leading man who was always cast as a character. I wanted to be Jack Nicholson or Jean Gabin.

The arts are not simply skills: their concern is the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human dignity, the arts have become the custodians of those values which most worthily difine humanity, which most sensitively define Divinity.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it.

I don't want to write every week, it's too much trouble, and I shall only write when I want something. If you think I'm sick when I don't write, you can send for me to come and tell you.

There's no future in being poor.

Satan and all his agents, with all their combined strength and subtilty, cannot separate one soul from Christ.

You never know who's going to be in the audience. You never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the first time, and you never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the last time.