“No one individual can tell the truth.”

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

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

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

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.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent.

No one can hate you with more intensity than someone who used to love you.

At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me.

You always get a special kick on opening day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.

Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.

I have no personality, or I have three, depending on how you look at it.

Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.

It’s no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for.