Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Smiles are the language of love.

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

No one but a fool is always right.

To remember oneself and to relax the body is something we have to do constantly.

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?

Romanticism is the expression of man's urge to rise above reason and common sense just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion.

You believe in God, then you don't believe anymore and when you have a big problem, you pray anyway...

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be; Where all the noises, that on peace intrude, Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee, Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.

I'm always busy. And I don't even see it really as work, because everything I do I still really enjoy.

I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.

Being in Birmingham, I thought I was going to be a gangster or a bag-runner or a thief. I heard music and I was determined to get out of there.