“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.

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

My wife gets so mad at me because I don’t like to cook on the grill.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

It’s when you get to 60 when everything starts to go pear-shaped. Everyone thinks that becoming an older guy is easy, but you never consider it fully. It comes as quite a shock.

The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.

It just seems like we get more popular every eight years or so. For some reason, it becomes cool to like Motorhead again.