I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Improvements enable adapting to new situations.

People will listen to you when you become the ‘Embodiment of Love’ [Prem Swaroop]. When can you become the ‘Embodiment of Love’? When you do not look for laws or rules

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

True freedom is not about being able to do whatever we feel like doing; rather, it is about being able to do what we truly want to do, in spite of what we feel like doing at the moment.

In autism there is just genes in part more or less of a probability that you will have the disorder, and that is where interactions with the environment are key.

I don't want to do just a liberal show.

I don't play an instrument - I just write in my head, and I usually hear fully formed songs. 'We Are Young' turned out so much like it was in my head. But it also exceeded all my expectations.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.