Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

It is highly important to always know whether your daily thoughts are working for you or against you.

Action not words are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.

Success to me is my friends and family are healthy and happy and I feel good about myself at the end of the night and I can sleep at night.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

God gave us family so that when we have a hard time praying for ourselves, we have others who will pray for us.

So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

My father was invited to play on a television show when I was 17 or 18, that was an early equivalent of educational television. Sunday afternoon kind of variety art show.

God has created us to love and to be loved, and this is the beginning of prayer-to know that He loves me, that I have been created for greater things.

Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable.