“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you

No one individual can tell the truth.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.

All l mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Colombia is not how people think it is. We used to eat fish every Sunday at the beach. In the town where I grew up, people did not tell lies.

Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.

At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.

It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day.

One thing that’s true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they’re not just in love for a day or a week.

And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not…not be able to do what I want with you.