Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.