“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.

Religion is the opium of the poor.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.

There are worse places to be than on your own.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

I read one psychologist’s theory that said, “Never strike a child in your anger.” When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he’s recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

The blindness of unbelievers in no way detracts from the clarity of the gospel; the sun is no less bright because blind men do not perceive its light.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

A gospel that doesn’t deal with the issues of the day is not the gospel at all.

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

When you read the book you see that these guys aren’t holding any punches. They’re straightforward. They’re honest. They’re giving you their honest opinion.

I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.

Why will people go astray when they have this blessed Book to guide them?