Top 100 James Lee Burke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People are what they do, not what they say, not what they think, not what they pretend to be.”

— James Lee Burke

2. “How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?”

— James Lee Burke

3. “The real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.”

— James Lee Burke

4. “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

5. “We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.”

— James Lee Burke

6. “I believe every... man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.”

— James Lee Burke

7. “God bless the Reference Librarians.”

— James Lee Burke

8. “No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy.”

— James Lee Burke

9. “The only thing an artist has to remember is to never lose faith in his vision.”

— James Lee Burke

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

— James Lee Burke

11. “Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you’re not aware of your loss until it’d irreversible.”

— James Lee Burke

12. “If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.”

— James Lee Burke

13. “To misuse one’s talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable.”

— James Lee Burke

14. “There’s no substitute for loyalty.”

— James Lee Burke

15. “One day you’ll have a quiet heart.”

— James Lee Burke

16. “There’s nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.”

— James Lee Burke

17. “We all end up in the same place. Some sonner than others.”

— James Lee Burke

18. “Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it’s not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.”

— James Lee Burke

19. “Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept the life you had planned was a dream written on water.”

— James Lee Burke

20. “If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.”

— James Lee Burke

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

— James Lee Burke

22. “When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn’t go back home easily.”

— James Lee Burke

23. “This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it’s the United States. Life will make a lot more sense,” he said.”

— James Lee Burke

24. “You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You’re going to be doing something – why not write?”

— James Lee Burke

25. “Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”

— James Lee Burke

26. “THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.”

— James Lee Burke

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

— James Lee Burke

28. “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

29. “There is no higher form of artistic expression then film.”

— James Lee Burke

30. “We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them.”

— James Lee Burke

31. “Money can’t buy happiness but it’ll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.”

— James Lee Burke

32. “Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.”

— James Lee Burke

33. “As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.”

— James Lee Burke

34. “At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself – the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?”

— James Lee Burke

35. “Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don’t recognize.”

— James Lee Burke

36. “A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.”

— James Lee Burke

37. “Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That’s why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile.”

— James Lee Burke

38. “The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.”

— James Lee Burke

39. “Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.”

— James Lee Burke

40. “Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can’t explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we’re wrong. Maybe it’s time you let yourself out of prison.”

— James Lee Burke

41. “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

42. “It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.”

— James Lee Burke

43. “If we break promises to God, shouldn’t we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?”

— James Lee Burke

44. “And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.”

— James Lee Burke

45. “You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you’re going to autograph them and sell them at auction.”

— James Lee Burke

46. “As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else.”

— James Lee Burke

47. “A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves.”

— James Lee Burke

48. “Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it’s more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody’s interested in a single.”

— James Lee Burke

49. “It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced – in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.”

— James Lee Burke

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “You pull on dat ’gator’s tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.”

— James Lee Burke