My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast.
Today begins my walk with you. Where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. When you sleep, I will sleep. When you rise, I will rise. I will pass my days within the sound of your voice, and my nights within the reach of your hand. And none shall come between us. – Manth Vow.
When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.
A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.
Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
There is this notion that the lives of the comfortable-off middle class don’t merit being treated seriously and with compassion.
Why should I be honored? Don’t I have enough attention, comfort and power already?
The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.
Use your power gently.
I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.
We are the slaves of slaves.
He accepted what each moment brough him, and never troubled himself with matters that were outside his control.
Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.
To put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can’t he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don’t start off being all that lovable, if we’re honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn’t it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.
All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the lonliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.