William Kennedy Quotations

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

My concern is students not taking notes will have a lasting effect on their true mastery of the material.

My guilt is all I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing.

Four years ago, many banks were insolvent or close to it because they were loaded down with a lot of bad loans, ... This was a drag on the economy, but many banks have been forced to merge or close.

He was ready. He was determined. He was the best student I ever had. He was such a learner. And he was a fighter like I was then, and like I am now. I will never stop fighting for what's right.

When I first talked about writing with Saul he insisted on the ability to change, to get a serious grip on what was real in your life, ... He was the 20th century's literary wizard, who fused the intellect and the imagination in glorious and comic language that we'd never heard before.

The decision was made to enter the room after visual confirmation where all the parties were,

This year the team seems to possess a lot more character and more depth.

People don't know what price people paid to make America human. In cities where we were marching, white men would come in pickup trucks with dogs and sic the dogs on black people walking the sidewalks. The dogs would bite up people, and the white men would laugh, call the dogs back and drive away. You've never seen such meanness like the meanness we went through.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Anger makes people stupid.