What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Theories have nothing to do with life.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!