“I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent.

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…

No man knows where the Castle of King Death is. All men and women, boys and girls, and even little wee children should so live that when they have to enter the Castle and see the grim King, they may not fear to behold his face.

Life calls the tune, we dance.

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

Religion is like a personal computer. You let people in if you want to… We’re all gods.

All I can say is that you make me… you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Frank nodded grimly. “Well…any goddess who throws a Ding Dong at a giant can’t be all bad. Let’s go.

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!