Try to be better than yourself.
It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
It’s the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
Don Quixote – I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
I decline to accept the end of man.
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
The writer in America isn’t part of the culture of this country. He’s like a fine dog. People like him around, but he’s of no use.
A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it’s liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
Listen to the voices.
I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
It wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.