Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

There are no rules when it comes to love.

Fear is exciting for me.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

People have so much going on in their heads. I’m like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better!

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Some animals are cunning and evil-disposed, as the fox; others, as the dog, are fierce, friendly, and fawning. Some are gentle and easily tamed, as the elephant; some are susceptible of shame, and watchful, as the goose. Some are jealous and fond of ornament, as the peacock.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

I am not young but I feel young. The day I feel old, I will go to bed and stay there. J’aime la vie! I feel that to live is a wonderful thing.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

Not always actions show the man; we find who does a kindness is not therefore kind.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.