James Lee Burke

“As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.”

“I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.”

“And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.”

“We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.”

“The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.”

“Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.”

“You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.”

“Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.”

“. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.”

“The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.”

“I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.”

“Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.”

“There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.”

“writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.”

“That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.”

“When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.”

“Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.”

“Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.”

“But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.”

“If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next.”