The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.