Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

Wishing to be friends is quick work but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.

What if all tomorrow brings is ashes and glass, and I can't tell you child, 'this too shall pass.' If all the world were windswept, cold and gray. And in the end there's nothing left to say.

Women do generally manage to love the guys they marry more than they manage to marry the guys they love.

Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

Yeah, I'd been around horses most of my life.

Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

You relate to a character and you find that character within yourself. It's all parts of me. I don't leave characters behind. I just let them go.

Sneaking out the back door to hand out with those hoodlum friends of mine.

I'm big in my faith. I try to keep God No. 1 in my life.