You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

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

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.

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

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.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.