William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament with faith.

Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

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.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

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.

Man will not merely endure he will prevail.

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

I decline to accept the end of man.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.

Landlord of a bordello The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels only when the clock stops does time come to life.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.