A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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.