The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
She was the captain of her soul
No one individual can tell the truth.
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
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.
a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. 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. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.
I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
Who gathers the withered rose?
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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.
As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
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