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.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

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.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.