"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. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
— William Faulkner

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"Courage is grace under pressure."
— Ernest Hemingway

"All extremes of feeling are allied with madness."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. "
— E.M. Forster

"Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand."
— E.M. Forster

"Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game."
— Philip Roth (The Human Stain)

"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."
— Don DeLillo

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn."
— Don DeLillo (Running Dog)

"These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after."
— Don DeLillo (Falling Man: A Novel)

"What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."
— Don DeLillo (Don Delillo's White Noise)

"There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness."
— T.C. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."
— Wallace Stegner

"It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any."
— Wallace Stegner

"It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West."
— Wallace Stegner

"What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take."
— William Maxwell

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)