A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.
There is no such thing as was – only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.
The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.
No man can write who is not first a humanitarian.
In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.