A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

We read to know that we are not alone.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me.

My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.

I'd love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine

I was grown up long before the grown ups were the grown ups.

The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.

I heard the little bird say so.

If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home.

Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.

A woman can't be alone. She needs a man. A man and a woman support and strengthen each other. She just can't do it by herself.

Everyone wants to see someone shoot someone in the head.

First draw dog, then fleas. First paint apple, then worm holes.

The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.