Quotes from Gerald Clarke

Poverty is much more than a way of life," Jack later wrote. "It goes much farther than skin-deep. It's no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you've known it, is you.

I can tell you, from a fund of experience, that one can be taken down from the rack, closer to death than to life—and then still have the most exquisite joys ahead of one.

He was opposed to capital punishment—"institutionalized sadism," he termed it—and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society.

All human life has its seasons, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There

When Perry sat down n front of the judge to be arraigned, Truman nudged Nelle. "Look, his feet don't touch the floor!" Nelle said nothing, but thought, " Oh, oh! This is the beginning of a great love affair." In fact, their relationship was more complicated than a love affair: each looked at the other and saw, or thought he saw, the man he might have been.

It's a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism—everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I'm trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way." In

In those days people moved more slowly down there, and Arch, who did just opposite, might almost have been taken for a Yankee.