The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don’t know and don’t hate.
The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.
Niagara Falls is very nice. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.
I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
Saints can spring from any soil.
Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
I would like to sit still for a while but I’m restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.
There is comfort in routine.
But Doc had one mental habit he could not get over. When anyone asked a question, Doc thought he wanted to know the answer.
But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there.
The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.
I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.
There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.
The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
I have starved and it isn’t nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.
A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.
I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.
I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.