Faith means intense usually confident belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

Risk means everything from being honest about your faith to moving to quitting a job that's paying you a fortune but it's not what's in your heart. Risking things is one of the biggest fears we have.

Once you're successful with a certain kind of music it's hard not to have faith in it as a means to stay successful.

My faith means everything to me. God and I talk constantly.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously and I would I think be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

Practice means to perform over and over again in the face of all obstacles some act of vision of faith of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

To me faith means not worrying.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

I had to succeed. Failure means I would have to be homeless again.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure and your people know that and are pessimistic therefore about trying something again is very high.

We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak whatever that means or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?

If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star whatever that means you might be setting yourself up for failure.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

To me the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and by analogy our own experience - more rather than less real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is even that it is what it is rather than to show what it means.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself and your imagination and experience but actually in the end you're not playing yourself.

The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience a greater maturity of practical reason and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

But human experience is usually paradoxical that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.