The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

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.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.