“If there is a God what the hell is He for?”

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts… That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth…

Try to be better than yourself.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only.

I don’t want money badly enough to work for it.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

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

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

For me, it always goes back to something I learned in basketball.

For more than two generations, my family had never achieved their ambitions. Their talents were unappreciated and unused. They deserved better. They hadn’t done anything wrong; they just had some bad breaks.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.

In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

The only time I really go on the Internet is for recipes.