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.

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

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