Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

Civilization begins with distillation

I think the best way I can put it,” Tom summarized, “was what I was once told that a Confederate prisoner said to his Union captor. The Yank said: ‘Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?’, and his prisoner replied: ‘Because you are here, Yank’.

If you're going to be a narcissistic schmuck, kid, don't bother studying Faulkner. Go straight to Brett Easton Ellis. He's the role model you need.

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.