I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

People don’t take trips, trips take people.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldnt say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didnt like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldnt shave.

Man unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe grows beyond his work walks up the stairs of his concepts emerges ahead of his accomplishments.