William Faulkner

I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.