“My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love.

Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Who gathers the withered rose?

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

I’m not talking about Russia in my music. I’ve never been to Russia. I’m not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

Everything’s a film idea if this is what you do.I’ve always been secretly confident that I’d never run out of ideas,because I’ve never had any.

I’ve been more content with just who I am.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

The biggest thing, and what I told some of the partners in the summit, was me thanking them for their constant support with everything that I’ve been through the last couple years on and off the court.

Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.