With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

Do not look down with disdain on what Christ spent so much to achieve for you.

Being involved with passion is one of the common characteristics I have observed in all the successful people I have come across.

We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]

It bothers me to hear people talk about things they know nothing about.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.

There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.

I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.

When your thoughts and opinions become intellectual gods in rebellion against the Word of God, you are in idolatry.

My sister used to say I had a frail chest and she 'd beat me up all the time.

I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.