I’m an emotional person.

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.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

You aren’t your work, your accomplishments, your possessions, your home, your family… your anything. You’re a creation of your Source, dressed in a physical human body intended to experience and enjoy life on Earth.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy, I guess.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I am not saying I am the best manager in the world. But I’m quite good.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

There are no rules when it comes to love.

Sometimes, I’m very embarrassed.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

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

There have been times that I’ve wept as I’ve gone from city to city and I’ve seen how far people have wandered from God.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting ‚All the Gods are bastards.‘

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I’ve learned that usually, the less I know about other people, the better off I am.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

I get nervous when I don’t get nervous. If I’m nervous I know I’m going to have a good show.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.