Harry Crews Quotes

#1. Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision

Harry Crews

#2. Doubt makes a man decent.

Harry Crews

#3. There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.

Harry Crews

#4. Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Harry Crews

#5. That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.

Harry Crews

#6. He knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different.

Harry Crews

#7. survival is triumph enough.

Harry Crews

#8. What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

Harry Crews

#9. Everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

Harry Crews

#10. The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

Harry Crews

#11. If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.

Harry Crews

#12. He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure.

Harry Crews

#13. The writer's job is to get naked ...

Harry Crews

#14. God love the car. It has shown the naked heart that lives in all of us. Man invented the car but the car
out of pure malevolence no doubt
changed the history of the world by reinventing man.

Harry Crews

#15. Men to whom God is dead worship one another.

Harry Crews

#16. I've never enjoyed myself. I'm incapable of enjoying myself. There's just some people who don't enjoy themselves very much.

Harry Crews

#17. Survival is truimph enough.

Harry Crews

#18. I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction.

Harry Crews

#19. Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.

Harry Crews

#20. Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'.

Harry Crews

#21. There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

Harry Crews

#22. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

Harry Crews

#23. It was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn't see how he was going to get through the rest of it.

Harry Crews