James Lee Burke quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from James Lee Burke on Wise Famous Quotes.

The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

Thinking at night isn't good for anybody.

God bless the world

This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense, he said.

All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there?

Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.

The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.

The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.

Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams, and I believe him.

Salish Kootenai College

We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.

I bet that guy could steal the stink off of shit

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

There is no higher form of artistic expression then film

You just got sprung."
"Nig Rosewater out there?" Clete asked.
"Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II.

No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice.

We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That's what makes it so painful, kiddo.

No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.

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

You don't have anything, you don't know anything, you're just a noise like a fart in somebody's pants, Segura said.

In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

But the rain gods went away. They ain't coming back, either." "How do you know that?" "They got no reason to. We don't believe in them no more.

If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next.

There's another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water.

Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive.

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

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

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

I'm tired of sackcloth and

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

Colored or not, we all work for the white man's cotton ...

You've got another problem. Like most white trash, you're disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance.

Soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare.

Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you're not aware of your loss until it'd irreversible.

Big as a horse turd floating in a milk shake.
Wyatt Dixson

Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory,

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

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

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

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

I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.

He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

One day you'll have a quiet heart.

Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head.

There's no substitute for loyalty.

Administrators don't believe in conspiracies. If they did, they'd have to resign their jobs. That

Fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips.

I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.

That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.

I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down. ~ Clete

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better, I said.

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.

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

God bless the Reference Librarians

Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed? Dave Robicheaux

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth's old dance through the heavens.

Night Comes to the Cumberland.

Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue.

Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.

Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable.

And I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.

Somehow sleep allows us to see clearly those very things that are obscured by the light of day.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

It's a great burden, being one of the good guys.

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.

Colored or not, we all pick the white man's cotton.

Maggie's face darkened, as

I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity.

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?

I messed my pants, he said.

A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves

I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man.

My experience has been that people who die for causes have few friends in death.

beautiful street in the Western world.