Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.
It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.
Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.
There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged...
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Teaching is the royal road to learning.
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?
The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.
I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.
A big iron needle stitching the country together.
