I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.