The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn’t dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
The Tax Collector’s letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven’t paid him.
What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
What a people talk about means something. What they don’t talk about means something.
Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I’m not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody’s business.
Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart.
There’s a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?
I believe in anything that works.
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn’t like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn’t stop, and she didn’t like that at all.
Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.
Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.
Nothing good ever ends.
It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world’s bad books.
Kids are always the only future the human race has.
I’m not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.
My work is writing, but my real work is being.