The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap

Life's not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

How difficult it is to be simple.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody.

Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once.

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.