If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

It was deeply a part of Lee’s kindness and understanding that man’s right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary

This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having...

Old Tom giggled, “Fooled ya, huh, Ma? We aimed to fool ya, and we done it. Jus’ stood there like a hammered sheep. Wisht Grampa’d been here to see. Looked like somebody’d beat ya between...

I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of the truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agonyof a lie is neverlost....

She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it.

Smile and thank God, that you are alive today!

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

I don’t ever drink alone. It’s not much fun. And I don’t think I will until I am an alcoholic.

There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and...

this nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction

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

Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray,...

Porque se dice que los humanos no se satisfacen jamás, que se les da una cosa y siempre quieren algo más. Y se dice esto con erróneo desprecio, ya que es una de las mayores...

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There...

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for...

You got a God. Don’t make no difference if you don’ know what he looks like.

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is–and a woman too, I guess.

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and...

But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there.

Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages...

it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.

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

Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.

And now they were weary and frightened because they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them. They knew that the team and the wagon were worth much more....

Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane,” he [Ed Ricketts] said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet...

Viskas nuo žmogaus priklauso. Vienintelė jėga – pats žmogus. Tik juo gali pasikliauti.

Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also––either...

I ain’t never done nothin’ that wasn’t part sin.

It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice!

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

Netikiu už pojūčių ribos egzistuojančia nuojauta, žaibu, vandeniline bomba ar net tokiais daiktais kaip žibutės, žuvų pulkai, bet žinau, kad jie egzistuoja. Netikiu šmėklomis, nors esu jų matęs.

Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

Money’s easy to make if it’s money you want. But with a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury, and they want love, and they want admiration.

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

Man has a choice and it’s a choice that makes him a man.

It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or...

…men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them…. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by...

The Mayor spoke proudly. ‘Yes, they will light it. I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir, but—I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not...

This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk.””Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee. Maybe that’s what immortality is.

In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the...

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind–but he must get there...