William Faulkner Quotes
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I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.
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He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
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Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
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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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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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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. 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. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
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I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
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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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People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
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Who gathers the withered rose?
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
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Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
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I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
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To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
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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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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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Did you ever have a sister? did you?