It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid.

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...

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

now i can get them teeth

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he...

Quién pagaría una buena cantidad por una virginidad que no puede violar más tarde, aunque solo fuera para asegurarse de que era auténtica?

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one...

You men,’ she says. ‘You durn men.

Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

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

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

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!

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

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.

Who gathers the withered rose?

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath...

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”(on Ernest Hemingway

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones...

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

You know that 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...

Złudzeniami można żyć dość długo i być dość szczęśliwym. Może to nawet jedyny sposób, żeby być szczęśliwym. To znaczy, kiedy się jest Polakiem i nie umie się nic prócz zakładania dynamitu pięćset stóp pod ziemią.

It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

I don’t think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don’t...

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He...

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

… a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf...

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

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them...

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity; it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said...

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won’t.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same...

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

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