“Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.”

“They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”

“For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness”

“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.”

“People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.”

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”