“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 is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.

He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

She was the captain of her soul

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…