There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.