174 Quotes by James Lee Burke

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?

Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it’s not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and without complaint.

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.

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

If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they’ll come, but by that time you won’t be thinking in terms of money or fame.

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.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?