"Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution."

"There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things."

"One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes."

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."

"We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves."

"The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature."

"Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion."

"I don't have to have faith, I have experience."