“Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.”

But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.

Writing is something you’ll never learn in any university or at any school. It’s something that is within you, and if it isn’t there, nothing can put it there.

There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.

I do my best to love everybody.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write.

My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.

Things are always better in the morning.

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.

As a reader I loathe introductions…Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.

There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

There is nothing more important in life than giving. Tolerance is forged when people look beyond their own desires.