Caring - about people, about things, about life - is an act of maturity.

I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.

I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.

At my age flowers scare me.

Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.

Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.

I can't afford to die; I'd lose too much money.

I would go out with women my age, but there are no women my age.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.

I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.

I think you need to go through some stuff to really appreciate life and understand what it means to persevere, overcome and have faith. I think those tough times make you a stronger person.

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Forgive many things in others; nothing in yourself.

Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years.

When about to commit a base deed, respect thyself, though there is no witness.

If fortune favors you do not be elated; if she frowns do not despond.

Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.

Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health?

Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

I just remember celebrating my 18th birthday at home, so that was a big party.

Just follow your dreams and be patient.

You will always have ups and downs in your life and your career, but just stay positive and go for it.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.

When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child.