William Faulkner

“I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter ho...”

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

“ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.”

“Pause, Mortal; Remember Vanity and Folly and Beware.”

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”

“You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.”

“I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in...”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then...”

“I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.”

“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a...”

“When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.”

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put...”

“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to...”

“And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease...”

“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is wor...”