If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

He who hath many friends hath none.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.

When I was married, I definitely went through a lying period.

A true friend encourages us, comforts us, supports us like a big easy chair, offering us a safe refuge from the world.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

We can be civil. We can still be friends, and be Democrats and Republicans, and have different views.

It is not so much our friends‘ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

You learn to know a pilot in a storm.

I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it’s necessary.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

A man should never neglect his family for business.

I have rules for a lot of areas of my life. Love is not going to be one of them.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Confidentially, the type of male I find most enjoyable for a friend is one who has enough fire and assurance to speak up for his convictions.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Patience is key for getting over a breakup. That, and trailing off your interaction after the breakup.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

I mean, families are weird.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

My wife doesn’t even want to spend 2 hours with me.

I’m not the girl who always has a boyfriend. I’m the girl who rarely has a boyfriend.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

Why lie? I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say the opposite of what I think, like some others do.

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.