James Lee Burke Quotes - Page 3

If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?

How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

God bless the Reference Librarians

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

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

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.

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.

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

Don't let anyone tell you that age purchases your freedom from fear of death.

We all end up in the same place. Some sonner than others.

Success, like fashion, is a fickle companion and can leave one in the wink of an eye.

Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?

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

The best thing about being a best-selling writer is being a best-selling writer. More seriously, today I can write full time and pay the bills.

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.

You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You're going to be doing something - why not write?

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

..why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality almost nobody believes in?...ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker?

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