I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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.
The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
Caddy smelled like trees.
Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
You have to write badly in order to write well.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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.
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
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