William Faulkner

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

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

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

She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.

It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.

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.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly ... is having to accept it.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

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.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

[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.

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.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

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.