Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.

The decent thing to do is to get rid of some of this money.