“The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.”

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

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.

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

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.

The real test of one’s belief in the doctrine of Habeas Corpus is not when one demands its application on behalf of one’s friends but of one’s enemies.

The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

I have no friends here apart from the dudes at my record label, and I didn’t go to school with no one.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

I want to have some stuff that I keep for myself, my friends, my family, my loved ones. That’s how I view.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

As my great friend Aristotle said, ‘If you cannot command, you must learn to listen.’ I’m not the hierarchy here. I am a worker bee.

You can’t get AIDS from a hug or a handshake or a meal with a friend.