William Faulkner

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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

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 time to read reviews.

A gentleman can live through anything.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

" 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly.  'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.' "

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. 

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.