“We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.”

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Things are never as bad as they seem.

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you’re working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn’t dream of interrupting on the golf course.

Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?

Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.

But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.

You can’t really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

It is hard to fight desire; but to control it is the sign of a reasonable man.

Humans are humans. If somebody’s mean to you, it’s not gonna feel good – no matter if you’re a man or a woman.

Be a man of your word, do what you say you’re gonna do, respect people the way you would like to be respected.

Being a feminist is being equal to do what a man do.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

You must judge a man’s greatness by how much he will be missed.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

The man enslaved to wealth can never be honest.