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.
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.
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
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.
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
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.
If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
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.
I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
Who gathers the withered rose?
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.
Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
Only when the clock stops does time come to life
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 draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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.
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.
Caddy smelled like trees.
. . .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.
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