Let your love flow out on all living things.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

Beauty is not in a woman’s face but in her soul.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

It is important to arrange games and competition so that all Scouts of the troop take part.

However great a sinner may have been, if he shows himself devout to Mary he will never perish.

Ugliness is the greatest of all sins.

When we turn our gaze to the inside, it becomes difficult to locate this familiar sense of self. To overcome that fear we need to feel special in some way.