“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.

He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

She was the captain of her soul

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts… That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth…

Try to be better than yourself.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

The horrible truth is that I am lazy and I am going to write and do bits that just hand themselves to me.

Don’t call me son unless you’re going to include me in your will. (When Adolph Rupp called him, “Son.”)

The people who know basketball, their elevators don’t go to the top.

Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it.

they’ve got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on in the world around them.

I didn’t think I was going to have to do three, but the idiot kept getting reelected.

Sometimes if I tell people, ‘I’m afraid that I’m really a fraud,’ or ‘I have a lot of self-doubt,’ they go.

The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.