"War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless, someone will always buy him drink or weapons."

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

"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 worth any number of old ladies."

"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."

"I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like."

"The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful and it's best to take the gesture the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree."

"I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone."

"Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words."

"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once."

"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."

"But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia."

"Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows."

"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi."

"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."

"In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior."

"Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago."

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."

"The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean."

"Man will not merely endure; he will prevail."

"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid."

"Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice."

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth."

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

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

"Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame."

"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."

"You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to."

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

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

"Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact."

"And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad."

"I will never lie again."

"Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs."

"When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't."

"Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets."

"Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music."

"The displacement of water is equal to the something of something."

"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."

"Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were."

"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."

"I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone."

"A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune."

"Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time."

"It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid."

"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 how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did."

"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."

"If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town."

"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."

"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 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."