A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
He is so stupid you can’t trust him with an idea.
We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields?
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.
He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.
There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.
In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.
When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
You know what it is? San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.
Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
A fallow field is a sin.
Thou mayest rule over sin.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.