Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

I nearly always write — just as I nearly always breathe.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.

... every little boy thinks he invented sin.

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans