It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it.

We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

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.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.