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’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave...

Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than...

When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

…the very old men […] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing...

I lied,” I said. …”I know it,” he said.”Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it’s something.””I cant,” he said.”There aint anything to do? Not anything?””I didn’t say that,” Grandfather said. “I said...

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.

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town

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

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism–unless the criticized isn’t within earshot.

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

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is...

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.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice…

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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

Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.

Civilization begins with distillation

It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.

When it’s a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice...

Because you know that’s all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got...

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,...

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.

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever...

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I’m convinced...

[B]ecause 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...

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you...

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....

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar…

I only write when the spirit moves me … and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

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

And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh...

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.

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

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

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...

I can’t do nothing. Just put it off. And that don’t do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain’t no more than mine.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.

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.