I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

You can tell the strength of a nation by the women behind its men.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

I’ve done the bad-boy thing. It was fun for a good three months. But the thing about bad boys is, you have to keep in mind, you’re never gonna marry a bad boy.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

My partner Donald Trump says that married couples should always have a prenuptial agreement. True, a prenuptial is important if one partner is much richer than the other before marriage, but Kim and I don’t have one.

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

I’ve never been a jealous person, and I’ve never felt built up by someone else’s failure – that’s a cheap thrill.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

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

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows – marriage does.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

A true friend encourages us, comforts us, supports us like a big easy chair, offering us a safe refuge from the world.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Be polite to all, but intimate with few.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.

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

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

There’s a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.

The people you choose to have around you make all the difference. My family and close friends keep me grounded. You have to have a mind of your own and a strong head on your shoulders. Cricket is the most important thing to me, so the rest of it pales in comparison.

Single life is so overrated.

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

I never promise anything. I don’t promise anything to my mum. I don’t promise anything to the supporters.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

Your friend is your needs answered.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.