Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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.
Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
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.
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...
I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.