Real patience is not the same as waiting impatiently for something for a long time. Patience is having patience with patience.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.

The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.

The work is with me when I wake up in the morning; it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.

A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper.

My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.

Staying humble has always been really important to me, and always being proud of what you're representing.

I like to move fast, and wearing high heels was tough, and low heels with a skirt is unattractive. So pants took over.

Failure to do the good that is within your power is hard to forgive. But mercy and prayer reclaim the negligent.

Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.