Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

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

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

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.