William Faulkner Quotes
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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
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Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
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Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
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Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
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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.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
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Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
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...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
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When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
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I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness – people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
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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.
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Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.