“The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.”

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

You see in others who you are.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

Country music is a form letter. You fi ll in the blanks. You move from one broken heart to the next one and from this marriage to that divorce, from a beating here to a beating there.

I always just want to move along to the next step.

Successful people don’t have fewer problems. They have determined that nothing will stop them from going forward.

The kind of job doesn’t matter. The length of time on the job doesn’t matter… If you work hard and do your best, you’ll be recognized and move onward.

I think, when all bands start, when you’re on your first album you have the benefit of hoovering up people who genuinely come across the music and really like it, but also those sort of ‘floating voters’ who just like pop music when they’re young.

Mindfulness has never been more important considering how the events of the world move in such an accelerated, frantic time.

Move fast and break things.

The moving toward one’s inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.