A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.

The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from enjoying it.

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.

In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.

When you betray somebody else you also betray yourself.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad you have a chance of being a prophet.

Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream but if it is the other one who is beaten then he constructs a theory.

Night is a time of rigor but also of mercy.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it's dark

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great great powers and I would say we only have learnt a very very small part of what it can do.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.