Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

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

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

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.

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

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

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.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

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

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

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.

My mother is a fish.

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

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

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

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

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.

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 it is life.

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

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

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...

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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

There is no was.

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

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

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.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

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

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

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

You can't. You just have to.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat