I write what I would like to read.

Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.

I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.

Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret.

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.

Peace - that was the other name for home.

Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Flatter not thyself in thy faith in God if thou hast not charity for thy neighbor.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.

Do not rush, for God's secret is patience. Everything that is meant to be, will come at the designated time.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.

The mind is smaller than the eye.