What a writer’s obituary should read – he wrote the books, then he died.
That’s a very good way to learn the craft of writing – from reading.
No one individual can tell the truth.
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.
Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.
You’re looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it’s hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
So vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.