It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

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.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.