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

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.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

We are more than just flesh and bones. There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

There is a great destructive force that comes upon us when we start comparing ourselves in the flesh with what we could be spiritually.

Oh, from what heights of blessing it is possible for a man to fall! To what depths of sin a man can descend, even with all that spiritual background!

Deep down in the Christian’s life, always and all the time, there is to be a “no” to every demand that the flesh may make for recognition, and every demand that the flesh may make for approval.

What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?

I don’t know what it’s like to be an arm amputee, or have even one flesh-and-bone leg, or to have cerebral palsy.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.