The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

Malice remains its animating impulse.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

When you stop making excuses, you start making progress!

Take up the weapons of the glorious army for the salvation of many thousands.

True, He is infinite Majesty, but He is also infinite Goodness and infinite Love. There can be no greater Lord than God; neither can there be a more ardent lover than He.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!

The friendship I have conceived will not be impaired by absence; but it may be no unpleasing circumstance to brighten the chain by a renewal of the covenant.

Growing up in the business you have to grow up very fast - you do have a different type of childhood, that has its benefits and it has its drawbacks.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.