I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
Civilization begins with distillation.
I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it’s the risk, the gamble. In any event it’s a thing I need.
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
A gentleman can live through anything.
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.
It is the writer’s privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.