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.
William FaulknerIt is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William FaulknerIf I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William FaulknerThe only rule I have is to quit while itโs still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when itโs going good. Then itโs easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then youโll get into a dead spell and youโll have trouble with it.
William FaulknerI don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
William Faulkner