If a story is in you, it has to come out.
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it’s not always.
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
Well, between Scotch and nothin’, I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.
Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything.