A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.

Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.

Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.

When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everything he had not encountered the problem of parking his automobile.

Loving God and loving one's neighbor are really the same thing.

A humble person is more likely to be self confident... a person with real humility knows how much they are loved.

When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.

There was at time in my life where all I wanted was a relationship, and I thought that was the most important thing.

Give voluntarily. When we catch a vision of God's grace, we will give beyond our duty.