Harry Crews Quotes – Quoterati

Best Quotes by Harry Crews (Top 10)

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
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it-you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.
Harry Crews
That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.
Harry Crews
If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. "Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.
Harry Crews
Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause"to look at them and make something of them.
Harry Crews
Survival is triumph enough.
Harry Crews
The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!
Harry Crews
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
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
There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.
Harry Crews

More Harry Crews Quotes

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.
Harry Crews
Men to whom God is dead worship one another.
Harry Crews
What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.
Harry Crews
I am not perfect." It came out in a rush of breath. "See I thought I was. Thank God I ain't. See a perfect thing ain't got a chance. The world kills it, everything perfect. (Listen to him!) Now see a thing that ain't perfect, it grows like a weed. Yeah, like a weed! A thing that ain't perfect gets hand clapping, smiles, takes the wire an easy winner. But the world ain't set up right if you perfect. You lible to run right into a brick wall. Looks like suicide. All the weeds say, looka there, it suicide!
Harry Crews
Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.
Harry Crews
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