Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

The world is always in movement.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

I don't think I blushed once in my entire life before I met you, " I say."There will be a lot of things your body never did before you met me, " he brags unabashedly.

The biggest mistake people make is to try to lose too much weight too fast.

I love the life I live. The Lord blessed me to be independent. I am independent.

Happiness consists not of having, but of being. It is a warm glow of the heart at peace with itself.

Do not be afraid to fail, but also, do not be afraid to succeed.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Even in my own church I heard the words, 'Francis Chan' more than I heard the words, 'Holy Spirit.'

You might want to comment on that, Honorable.

Irish tory employers hid[e] their sweatshops behind orange flags, and Irish home rule landlords us[e] the green sunburst of Erin to cloak their rack-renting in the festering slums of our Irish towns.

You can depend on no man, on no friend, but him who can depend on himself.