“I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;”

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Travis McGee series, The Deep Blue Good-by (1964)
Context: These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worthy of the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.

2010s, Interview with Chad O'Carroll (2012)

Pride and Joy, co-written with William "Mickey" Stevenson and Norman Whitfield.
Song lyrics, That Stubborn Kinda Fellow (1962)

Romulus thumps his chest. "Honor is what you do."
Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 42: The Poet

"Hello (I Love You)"

"But this must transcend even national borders and extend to humanity because if ideas be only for the prosperity of your country, it would end where it began, by being a prophet to your own community and very probably to your own self.
In another lecture in Madras now (Chennai) quoted in "Selected Letters, Gandhi -Sarojini Naidu Correspondence, Preface".
Poetry