James Lee Burke Quotes

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

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.

Some people say you pick up the Dirty Boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it.

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.