Jim Butcher

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.