Harry Crews Quotes

25 quotes in 568 categories

• We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why?…
• Hell came right along with God, hand in hand. The stink of sulfur swirled in the air of the church, fire burned in the aisles,…
• I've never enjoyed myself. I'm incapable of enjoying myself. There's just some people who don't enjoy themselves very much.
• I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the…
• If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham,…
• The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were…
• I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench…
• The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.
• Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else,…
• The writer's job is to get naked...
• Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.
• What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.
• There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.
• Survival is triumph enough.
• That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.
• Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day…
• Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.
• There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.
• I am not perfect." It came out in a rush of breath. "See I thought I was. Thank God I ain't. See a perfect thing…
• I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a…

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