Betty Smith Quotes

I drink because I don't stand a chance and I know it. I couldn't drive a truck and I couldn't get on the cops with my build. I got to sling beer and sing when I just want to sing. I drink because I go...

I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life's too short. If you ever find a man you love, don't waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, 'I love you. Ho...

About Author

Betty Smith (born Elisabeth Lillian Wehner; December 15, 1896 – January 17, 1972) was an American playwright and novelist, who wrote the 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I need someone, thought Francie desperately. I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the under...

I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the understanding must be part of the holding.

I think it's good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.

I'll not punish you for having an imagination.

Isn't hot coffee a wonderful thing? How did people get along before it was invented?

It doesn't take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.

It takes a lot of doing to die.

I’ll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a f...

Now his children are getting old too, like him, and they have children and nobody wants the old man any more and they are waiting for him to die. But he don't want to die. He wants to keep on living e...

Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect.