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.''