“You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.”

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love.

Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Who gathers the withered rose?

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

To impute our recovery to medicine, and to carry our view no further, is to rob God of His honor, and is saying in effect that He has parted with the keys of life and death, and, by giving to a drug the power to heal us, has placed our lives out of His own reach.

You always get a special kick on opening day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.

One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.

Before you get married you should meet your fiance’s parents. It is not enough that you like his parole officer.

People get jaded in every profession, but for some reason,

Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.

This is getting funny, but there ain’t nobody laughing.

You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.