James Lee Burke Quotes & Sayings

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

“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.”

“When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.”

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

“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.”

“We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.”

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

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

“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.”

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