A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Communism, ” I observed, “is a pile of wank.

Till the first friend dies, we think our ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it, itself as yet unknown.

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

Tolerance is the uncomfortable feeling that in the end the other could be right.

Beating John Landy was my defining race.

When I get old, I'm going to the old folks' home. I don't want to be one of those guys who's hanging around the house bothering the kids. But not just any old folks' home. I want the whole top floor.

I've learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you've got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

Somehow I find it easier to inhabit characters if they are a little bit pathetic. I do seem to have an affinity with pathetic people.

Science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions.