Jay Parini Quotes

I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form.

If I ever write a book, it will be called 'Bottle Blonde.'

Much of my work has been done in first person.

I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough for that.

I hope in my book [My Beloved World], that the sense that I really feel connected comes through.

What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

I always loved song writers who wrote songs in the first person, so it's kind of like that.

My films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

We're in danger of losing an even more foundational belief of Christianity: that salvation is only possible through faith in Jesus Christ.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' Say not, ' I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.' For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

When you realize no one else on this earth can be like you... that no other soul may know the beauty, sorrow, light and darkness you alone are given to see... then you will, at last, be the fearless individual your Heart of hearts has called you to be.

God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.

When I'm writing a book, I draw from my immediate experience, and my books are therefore almost a snapshot of where I am at that moment in my life.

I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.

I never want to position myself where I seem like an ambassador of anti-racism. I am fortunate enough to say that I've never experienced extreme amounts of racism, but a lot of my friends do.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

I started writing it, because it was seven years ago. But yes, that is the genesis of why I started writing.

It's hard to answer that from my own perspective because when I'm playing I know where it is coming from and the sources.