History is not was, it is.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
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.