It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown.

Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.

Meg and Belch only had eyes for each other. Not in the usual romantic sense.

Never ever ever give up. You can change and move around but NEVER ever give up

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.

The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved-- they are Jesus in disguise.

The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.