Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.

I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.

I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.

Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.