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.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

My faith helps me overcome such negative emotions and find my equilibrium.

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hate a man for being a friend to her.

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

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

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

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

Love is an interesting thing.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

I guess that’s one of the things about growing up in the fifties – it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be at least as successful as your parents.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Well, it’s looks like I’ve a love-hate thing going on with Monaco.

I believe when it comes to love, there’s something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don’t think I have a pattern.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

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

Fear is exciting for me.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

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

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Of course I get hurt.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

Kissing someone is pretty intimate, actually very intimate, and your heart always kind of skips a beat before you do that.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

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

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.