Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
My father was often angry when I was most like him.
I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.
Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
God forgives those who invent what they need.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.
Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.
Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
You lose your manners when you are poor.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.
People change and forget to tell eachother.
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Nothing of course begins at the time you think it did.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.
