Quotes from Harry Crews

There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.

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 I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'.

The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!

So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

Men to whom God is dead worship one another.

everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

Survival is truimph enough.

He knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different.

It was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn't see how he was going to get through the rest of it.

I've never enjoyed myself. I'm incapable of enjoying myself. There's just some people who don't enjoy themselves very much.

He had one of those good country voices: part drunk, part hound dog, part angel.

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.