Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

Without a compelling vision to draw you away from your present and pull you through any challenges and into the future, it becomes easy to settle for a lesser life than the one you could achieve.

Can you, at a minimum, objectively step back—throw out the stereotypes, ditch the conformity, set aside the religion—and ask yourself, why? Why Jesus?

It wasn't right. Evil should look evil. It should reek like rotten flesh, not smell like pine cleaner and fabric softener

Before I disappear behind the door, I stop and turn around to look at him.

Weakness is what keeps driving us to God, by the overwhelming conviction that there just isn't anywhere else to go.

When the Lord fights the battles of the saints, he does it so effectually that nobody gets nervous but the enemy

It takes awareness that it's not only not a bad thing to let others do things their own way, it is in fact an improvement. It makes life richer and more interesting.

I have a hard time memorizing stuff. I'm always in the process of writing a new song, so trying to learn a new one takes a minute.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.