James Lee Burke Quotes

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the...

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

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain...

As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of we...

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a w...

. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what yo...

The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a ...

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

Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where ...

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

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, an...

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think ...

I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and s...

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it...

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually ...

My experience with age it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unc...

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the ...

I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midni...