A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

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.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

I decline to accept the end of man.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

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.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

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.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

A gentleman can live through anything.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.