When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

My wife is already in Heaven.

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.

I doubt that the Lord cares much which honorable vocation you choose. But He does care if you love one another and serve one another.

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

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

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.

It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

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

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

Whatever possession we gain by our sword cannot be sure or lasting, but the love gained by kindness and moderation is certain and durable.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Where there is love there is life.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.

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

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

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.

We teach that God’s love for His children is infinite.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I’m upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.

Give a child love, laughter and peace, not AIDS.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.

She would have thrived as a grandmother. I know how much she would have contributed to their lives, and I am sad they will miss out on that.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.

I think women want freedom. They want to be empowered. They want hope. They want love; they want all the things that I want, and I’m not afraid to say those things and act on them, and I think that’s why they identify with me.

There are no rules when it comes to love.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.