“Like I say, I killed a man or two but I'm no thief. My ma raised me better.”

“It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This--" I held out my hands "--this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.”

“No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.”

“To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.”

“It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, 'He was a man who didn't believe in violence, He's a good man... and dead.”

“Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.”

“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!”