For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.
You’re looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it’s hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
So vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age. Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don’t square.
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don’t. They don’t care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.