The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.
When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.
How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?
There’s nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.
You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.
I wouldn’t write anything autobiographical. If you’ve lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it’s a little bit vain, it seems to me.
It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced – in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.
God bless the Reference Librarians.
Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.
There’s no substitute for loyalty.
If we break promises to God, shouldn’t we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
Never read bad stuff if you’re an artist; it will impair your own game. I don’t know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art’s the same way.
If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going to happen next.
I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it’s no one’s fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child’s courage.
There is no higher form of artistic expression then film.
When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn’t go back home easily.
And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.
Money can’t buy happiness but it’ll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.
THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.