Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them...

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity; it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said...

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

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won’t.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same...

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and...

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would...

The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn’t really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like...

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This–the actual pistols–was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it...

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow...

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a...

I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the...

Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years...

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since...

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.

Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.”(on Mark Twain)

It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep...

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

…women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love …

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

I will never lie again.

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...