In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

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.

Your level of knowledge will determine the level at which God relates with you.

An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

You just can’t live in Texas/if you don’t have a lot of soul.

It’s foolish to talk of an “Asian century” or an “emerging market century” because events move at a pace that renders this degree of durability obsolete.

Seasteading could be the means by which humanity will live sustainably.

Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.

If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should welcome that Englishman as an Indian.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.

You have to be great friends and make each other laugh. We laugh a lot and neither is jealous of the other.