To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.

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.

Irony: Taking a 170-year-old envy-based "philosophy, " which has led to the murder of several hundred million human beings and the oppression of billions more, and calling it "progressive".

Let your constant practice be to offer yourself to God, that He may do with you what He pleases.

The important thing is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This means that if you're doing ten tasks, two are going to be vastly more important than others.

I think I'm long past the days where I would go to the store and drop a couple hundred bucks on CDs, so my playlist is gonna be pretty long in the tooth.

I just want to make music and make a living. I just have to find the means of doing that.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

I'm a federalist. I believe in the Italy of municipalities, of the Renaissance, not in Mussolini's centralization.

I am convinced that a person is entitled to as much privacy as he wants. It should be his privilege to keep certain areas of his life out of the newspapers.

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious.

Well: the day is a poem but too much Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.