Quotes from James T. Farrell

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

All his life he had wished and waited, and there had been no change, except for the worse.

He was sad because he had grown up, and because the years passed like a river that no man could stop.

They served the rich, and tried to think that they were rich.

His face was a gaze of primal obtuseness.

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.

He had come to America, haven of peace and liberty, and it, too, was joining the slaughter, fighting for the big capitalists. There was no peace for men, only murder, cruelty, brutality.

He was still where he had always been. Just hoping.

So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him there's a few boys on 58th Street who'll throw a party for him if he'll drop around.

He took a meditative puff on his stogy, and informed himself that time was a funny thing. Old Man Time just walked along, and he didn't even blow a How-do-you-do through his whiskers. He just walked on past you. Things just change.

There was a drugged sanctimoniousness about the sappy-looking birds seated in the lobby. Studs felt that there wasn't a man or a regular guy among them.

He had a picture in his mind of Studs Lonigan courageously telling life and the world to stick itself up it's old tomato.

Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst.

But literature is one of those realms in which man asserts his freedom, his spirit: in literature of a first-rate order, man attains a kind of imaginative freedom in which he asserts, implicitly, that in his spirit, he will not be the slave of fate. He assimilates tragedy, sorrow, and bitterness.

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.