“Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

I think my top salary was maybe in 1966. I made $17,000 and 11 of that came from selling other players’ equipment.

My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.

Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

What made me want to play guitar was that painting of Wings in concert in the gatefold of Wings Over America. It looked so exciting… I wanted to be part of it.

I’m a pluralist. I’ve always argued that as many different films as possible should be made.

And just about anybody you can think of who has made country music has been on that stage. That’s what makes you so nervous.