William Faulkner

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.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

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

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

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 salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

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

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

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