I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

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.

When you totally commit yourself to a project and do your work quietly and well, unknown friends will find you and angels will surround you.

We choose to remain angry. Someone else may have initiated the anger but we choose whether we remain in this state or not.

I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.

It is good to take a weekend and just you, or you and your dog, head out into the wilderness. Walk by yourself. Be by yourself. It will help you in your search for stillness and perfection.

You can order yourself to treasure a moment, to cling tight to a feeling and never let it fade, but it's your brain, that three-pound lump of hamburger, that makes the final call.

Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

I think music follows the trends of the collective conscious.

I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.

The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.