For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

The kind person is rewarded by nature.

It's just as political, what you do in the bedroom is just as political as what you do in public.

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

It is our confidence in the sovereign grace of God that gives us any hope of success in missions.

Whatever you do, make a difference. Earn the right to look back at something and say, 'I did that.'

I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world - to pronounce it -- and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Get beyond his eyes and his smile and the sheen of his hair - look at what's really there.

Except for the usual house chores, doing income tax, etc., I am free to write whenever I want.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.