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

"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."

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."

"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

"You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults."

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

"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."

"What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe."

"She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it."

"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."

"Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid."

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

"Because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself."

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

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written."

"Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence."

"I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice."

"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."

"Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."

"Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows."

"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people."

"He looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit."

"The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten."

"The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; "play! Play!"

"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

"Now i can get them teeth."

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

"Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks."

"It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand."

"One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours."

"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 closer than anybody else."

"The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it."

"I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are."

"It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence."

"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 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 he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."

"I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad."

"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."

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

"If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can."

"And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough."

"It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."

"The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless--a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer."

"It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment."

"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other."

"Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is."

"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

"And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit."