“One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.”

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

I’m just getting better and better. It’s just like a bunch of worker bees protecting the king bee, because I’m not a queen bee. I’m a king bee.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

I want the government to provide the military so we don’t get invaded by somebody and destroyed. I want the government to provide the roads so I can get from point A to B. In terms of taking care of my day to day needs, I want to do that myself. I want my community to do that.

Everybody’s story of getting into the industry is just as difficult as the next person. Whether you come from money or no money, it’s not easy… you have to offer yourself; you can’t expect someone to get you.

You must have perseverance, and then you must have wisdom. Then you combine these four and then you get to where you want to get to.

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

I get along with everyone except for men my age, who are bourgeois or retired or boring.