Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Start with big dreams and make life worth living.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

If we study the Scriptures, we find the well of salvation.

You are my eternal love and I am your eternal beloved. That is the truth I came to believe.

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everybody likes to have an audience - that's why most people have kids, isn't it?

Dying to be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing.

If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.

My wonder button is being pushed all the time.

Your greatest pleasure is that which rebounds from hearts that you have made glad.

I am dying a thousand cruel and unusual deaths as fifty pairs of eyes take me in, size me up like something that should be hanging over a fireplace in a gentleman's den.