War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today