I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

In the midst of the adversity, we can still strive by the grace of God

Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.

God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.

Can our Society meet the Challenge of a Technological Future?

Wicked ones are like fire. Even if pu on hea, they burn only. They do not leave unhurt even their well - wishers and benefactors.

Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages.

Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.