American Quotes

I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life.

Books are only the shadow and life the real thing. I believe this as strongly as any belief I hold.

You don't see a lot of difference between the Gin Blossoms and the Byrds.

There was just no way I could leave this little Martin guitar in my apartment overnight or even in the afternoon, and expect to find it there when I got back.

So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.

It's often said that life is strange. But compared to what?

I've had an advantage; I've had a sort of open public acceptance in New York that doesn't happen to just anyone trying to make the transition you were talking about.

I'm not trying to be the new anybody.

I wouldn't be interested in just doing a show that's mapped out and choreographed with a set list. That would've been boring so long ago it just wouldn't be any fun.

I relate to the audiences and they know me. It's pretty real.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

I don't cringe when I think of doing old material. A lot of the people have been with me through the years.

Folk-rock hasn't changed much over the decades since the Byrds started it.

But I'm able to just keep going, and that's the challenge. It's the next song. And then just enjoying the shows and people who come out to the shows. It's pretty organic, really.

And the music, as far as a type of music, it's still pretty viable.

When they came to you for your line, you had to be ready and you had to get it in one.

Someone at Disney heard one of the records and called me in to do the sounds of Lucifer the Cat in Cinderella.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

I never cared what kind of grade I got.