“Women feel safe with me as well they should, because not only am I morally objected at going too far, but physically I cannot do it.”

Marygreen did not change in sixteen years. It had changed little enough in the past two years.

Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should, they never get around to do what they want to do.

Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.

Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.

There’s an old press-agents’ slogan that’s good advice: Don’t read your publicity – weigh it.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There’s only birth and death and the union of two people – and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.

The only genius that’s worth anything is the genius for hard work.

War makes strangers bedfellows.

there are only two ways to make a lot [of money] while you’re young: One is to entertain the public; and the other is to cheat it.

She was luxuriously tired and her muscles felt sore from the unaccustomed strain of riding astride.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

I think Americans love success – but hate the people who have it.

I guess experience is just learning at first hand the things you knew all along anyway.

They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic.

Nothing had ever tasted so good as the cool golden ale she swallowed from a pewter tankard. She slept deeply that night and longer than she had intended.

My momma didn’t clean up floors so I could be a thug… so I could wear my pants down.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good.

I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive.

There’s no real template to follow these days for what a band should and shouldn’t be – bands are just becoming these weird little Internet avatars that you either follow or download or interact with in some removed way.

I should have written books instead of reading them.