I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
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