What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

You lose your manners when you are poor.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night matter not at all.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.