William Faulkner

The quality of the story is everything. The writer has to make it up, and if he does it right, it will seem as true as if it happened yesterday.

I'm trying to make you see it -- not hear it.

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.

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 writer's work is only a record of the passing-through, of the momentary and transient, of the beautiful and the terrible.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

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.

The problem for me is to make the reader believe it, to make him live it.

I think that in life, in time, everything is accidental.

The South is fine if you had somebody to ramble the backroads with, but I've never gotten on that with anyone.

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. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

No one can write a good novel unless he is a hero himself.

The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much guidance and inspiration he's gotten from others, he thinks he knows better and is born -- or raised -- to be a dissenter, a rebel.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day he'd had the courage to live in all of them; the next day he preferred to fake a life in none of them.

They endured.

Jealousy is a poor tribute.

The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.

I am the man with a name but without an identity, and I have no moral right to call myself by my name.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.