You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

Many admire, few know.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

History is more or less bunk.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

This is not a bad life.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

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.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

There is so much that people take for granted.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.