William Faulkner Quotes
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There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
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A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
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Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.
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Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
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I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
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Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
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He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
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Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling.
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I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
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It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.