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

- William Kennedy

Anger makes people stupid.

- William Kennedy

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

- William Kennedy

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 wors…

- William Kennedy

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

- William Kennedy

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.

- William Kennedy

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

- William Kennedy

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

- William Kennedy

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.

- William Kennedy