The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

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.

When you have the power of time, you can take possession of your time, there is nothing you cannot become.

You can believe whatever you will, as long as you realize: it was your decision!

For me, happiness is doing my best and trying to be helpful.

Learn not to judge your meditation. Just meditate, do your best, set a minimum period of time and meditate.

Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate.

It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

I love people and want to be good to people. If I'm in restaurant and somebody doesn't treat a waitress right, I literally will leave. I will unfriend you. You are not my friend anymore.

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

People should have literary and cultural taste and should not bomb hotels.