Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

I hate birthdays.

I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

I need this wild life, this freedom.

I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion.

I will see this game of life out to its bitter end.

I love my work but do not know how I write it.

The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.

Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.

I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.

I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.

The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am the man to do it.

I arise full of eagerness and energy, knowing well what achievement lies ahead of me.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.

I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.

It was a decent New Year's, but it took a million officers to make it so.

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.

Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.

Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.

Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant as the years multiply.

Then the wind blew cool through the pinyons on the rim. There was a sweet tang of cedar and sage on the air and that indefinable fragrance peculiar to the canyon country of Arizona.

If I fished only to capture fish my fishing trips would have ended long ago.

Love grows more tremendously full swift poignant as the years multiply.

Twice a week I would receive injections or IV's of Factor VIII which clotted the blood and then broke it down.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

I had no blood relatives till I made some.

I know that I'm very lucky to be alive. For 35 or 40 years I've spilt my blood and broke my bones and spent years in hospitals.

Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

Once blood is shed in a national quarrel reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men.

I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people.

I don't need power at the cost of spilled blood.