Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing – for life itself is a writer’s love until death.
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.
A closed mind is a dying mind.
In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.
There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.
Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets.
Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
If it’s freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.
Funny, isn’t it, how your whole life goes by while you think you’re only planning the way you’re going to live it?
The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.
It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn’t here.
There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.