Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

Mediate on the Scripture to nourish your soul.

Do not use either harsh words or negative words. They only bring sadness and weaken the soul.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Be it mine to draw from wisdom's fount, pure as it flows, that calm of soul which virtue only knows.

I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

In our society, it is psychological murder to deprive a man of a job...you are in substance saying to that man "You have no right to exist.

Many of my friends were blacklisted. America should be ashamed of it forever.

Even when I was down, I treated myself as a star and eventually the world would catch up.

A frozen river is not a dry one, it's just a still river on the surface but is still moving, and so am my winter writing.