Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off."
"This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them."
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good."
"They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words."
"If a story is in you, it has to come out."
"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."
"A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle."
"The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it."
"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."
"Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory."
"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."
"Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree."
"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."
"I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized"
"There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow."
"When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me."
"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."
"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."