Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

There is no country but the heart.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.