There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Holy Scripture is Holy Scripture.

The best trees produce the sweetest fruits.

With the wolves around, your humbleness is your worst adversary.

I couldn’t peel my eyes off her face or her body. Even if she had asked me not to follow her, I would have followed anyway. I was in a Norah state of mind.

A great many open minds should be closed for repairs.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

When you try, God is there and you get the grace you need to get you through.

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

If we were second class citizens we'd be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we'd be driving a Rolls Royce.

When I get off tour, I want nothing to do with anyone.