When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

It's a blindness thing, faith.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears.

The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

[To reporter who telephoned with news of her Oscar:] If you are joking me, I will get up immediately and kill you wherever you are.

We are pregnant with freedom.

It's a dangerous thing when someone gets up in the morning and has nothing to eat.

If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Surrender to life itself and you'll just be rewarded with so many things. And I've been rewarded so many times, in so many mysterious ways. So I have no reason to be disappointed with anything.

We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must hang together.

It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn't for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.