American Quotes

Today's younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.

The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else. was to be indifferent to that difference.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

I can see every monster as they come in.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

All literature is gossip.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.