...lifeless and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution itself was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence conception and birth, and de… - William Faulkner

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, “I better move. I better get away from here.”

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.