Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

Even God has a need

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.

Charm and perfection hardly cooperate. Charm premises little mistakes which one would like to cover.

Vanity's ridiculous, but we all fall prey to it from time to time.

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

The mother's love is not given to us to spoil us with indulgence, but to soften our hearts, that we may in turn soften others with kindness.

Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.

The great advantage of the Lib Dems is precisely that no-one knows what they stand for.

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.