Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

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.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

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

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

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

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