william Faulkner

“A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination.” 

“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”

“I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express... but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.”

“If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back as a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

“That’s not right…It’s not right for one animal to have it all and the rest of us to have nothing.”  [The Days When Animals Talked]

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling ‘Kilroy was here’ on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”