It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.

Nothing good ever comes without a price.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.

The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

Call listened with amusement--not that the incident hadn't been terrible. Being decapitated was a grisly fate, whether you were a Yankee or not. But then, amusing things happened in battle, as they did in the rest of life. Some of the funniest things he had ever witnessed had occurred during battles. He had always found it more satisfying to laugh on a battlefield than anywhere else, for if you lived to laugh on a battlefield, you could feel you had earned the laugh. But if you just laughed in a saloon, or at a social, the laugh didn't reach deep.