A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

We want justice, but at the same time, we gotta love and come together and bring unity, and I feel it’s gonna happen.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

I’ve missed out on a lot of things, going out with friends.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

My wife told me if there is any rumors about me, it better be about politics and not about my social life.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

And one more thing.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

When I think of the love I feel for each member of our family, I sense, to a slight degree, the love that our Heavenly Father bears for His children.

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

The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Where love is, there God is also.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

The truth is God created us to have relationship with us. He wants to love us and take care of us, and He wants us to love Him. That’s where our walk with Christ has to start.

He that displays too often his wife and his wallet is in danger of having both of them borrowed.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

The best way to know God is to love many things.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.