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'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.

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

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.

True freedom is a freedom with clear boundaries. True freedom understands the real essence of do’s and don’ts. A freedom without restrictions that brings comfort is a freedom in chains.

The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

Men fight wars. Women win them.

It's just, you can get very complacent if you do the same thing all the time and especially the comedian, it gives me you know different things to react to and respond to, and it stimulates me.

When you love someone, you shouldn't feel that they should love in return. You have to give people freedom.

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.

It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden.

I think the best thing is being able to play golf competitively for a living. Ever since I was a little boy, that's something I've always wanted to do, and now I get a chance to live out my dreams.