“I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
“They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
“The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.”
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
“It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.”
“To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.”
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end”