“I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

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.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

Strength is not nearly as important as desire. I don’t think you can teach anyone desire. I think it’s a gift. I don’t know why I have it, but I do.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!