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.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

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

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

Here’s something that’s contrary to popular belief: I actually don’t like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don’t. I do not like to think at all.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

Beauty without expression is boring.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

I am in my own head most of the time.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

If your mom cries a lot, you probably cry a lot. It’s what you learn.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

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

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

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.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

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

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.