I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

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.

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

There’s a universalunderstanding betweenmen of the silent sorrowa man endures whenhe loses a woman heloves

I've learned... that just one person saying to me, 'You've made my day!' makes my day.

Public school teachers are the new priesthood while traditional religion is ridiculed and maligned.

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.

My mom can still slap me silly and my dad still threatens to ground me.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

The indifference of men, far more than their tyranny, is the torment of women.

I really don't care what I look like as long as it fits with the thing I'm working on.

Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.