All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.