The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

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 them alone.

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

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

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

Love doesn't die; the men and women do.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

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

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible

Caddy smelled like trees.

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.

History is not was, it is.

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

She was the captain of her soul

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

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.

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

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

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.

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...

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

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

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

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

My, my. A body does get around.

She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

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

Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.

I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.