The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

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.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be -- curious -- to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

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.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

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

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

At first glance the tree seemed alive with frantic squirrels. There appeared to be forty or fifty of them leaping and darting from branch to branch until the whole tree had become one green maelstrom of mad leaves.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?