I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

But, you know, you can’t be a star at home.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.

I like someone who is a little crazy but coming from a good place. I think scars are sexy because it means you made a mistake that led to a mess.

My mother always wanted to give back.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.

I’ll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it’s sitting on a bench waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

How can we help President Obama?

Nicki Minaj, I’m at MTV. I’m going to be honest with you: I love you. I like you. I want you; I want you to be mine. Only reason I’m not telling you this face to face is because I understand that you’re busy.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

It has been hard for me to find it, but I have found love.

God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

How much better it would be if all could be more aware of God’s providence and love and express that gratitude to Him.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.

All you need is love.

My ultimate life dream project is my kids. My family.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‚Trey‘ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.

There’s love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we’re alone in our heads.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.