Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw."
"That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today"
"Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool."
"A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time."
"Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be."
"Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do."
"The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."
"Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura."
"Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be."
"I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions."
"Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."
"The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds."
"We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off."
"Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race."
"Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you"
"I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. 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."
"...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road."
"You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me."
"I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it."
"To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone."