I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

When you encounter difficulties and contradictions do not try to break them but bend them with gentleness and time.

Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death the real and the imagined past and future the communicable and the incommunicable high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions.