Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.
Reading without thinking is nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain’t good for nothin’. I believe what the old Quaker said, ‘Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.
If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it’s a ‘historical novel.’ If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it’s a ‘Western’- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, ‘He was a man who didn’t believe in violence, He’s a good man... and dead.
People have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If crooked gamboling, thieving and robing are covered over folks will tolerate it longer than out right violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.
Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.
A man marries by accident, a woman by design.
Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.
People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.