“Now, partly that was work, and partly that was brains, but very largely it was having the guts, the guts to be immodest in the right way.”

“It's the Idea that wins every time — the Idea with brains and guts behind it.”

“That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.”

“By the way, don’t breathe on the upholstery or I may have to gut you. (Nick)”

“It was beautiful in a harsh I'm-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way.”

“Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.”

“The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.”

“The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you…”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea.”