If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.
You can’t change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can’t change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.
I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end up with a skyscraper made of wood.
How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
I’ve made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body – it just wears it out.
Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind.