James Lee Burke

The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it's spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#nature

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#home #leave #mail #never #put

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. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#find #friends #go #going #lean

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

— James Lee Burke

#hearing #inside #matter #narrator #simply

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. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#autograph #because #box #day #going

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. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#age #care #great #i #minds

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

— James Lee Burke

#every #good #jesus #knight #lives

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

— James Lee Burke

#dues #every #incremental #into #payment

I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#arabia #autobiographical #bit #consideration #i

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. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#figure #give #going #happen #mm