James Lee Burke Quotes

Don't ever quit. Never quit. Never show anybody you're hurt. Grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It will drive them up the wall. You always stay true to your own principles. You always believe in your gift. God doesn't make mistakes when he presents someone with a gift like that. It's there for a reason. Tell the naysayers, those who reject you, to drop dead! Who cares?

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.

I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.

God bless the Reference Librarians

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

What's the worst thing about getting old? Getting old.

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.

If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.

The best thing about being a best-selling writer is being a best-selling writer. More seriously, today I can write full time and pay the bills.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.