It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

A big iron needle stitching the country together.

It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

People who keep journals have life twice.

To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other.

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.