William Faulkner Quotes
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Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
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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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...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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They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
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Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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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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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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No one individual can tell the truth.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.
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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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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
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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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I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
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A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
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I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.
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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
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Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.
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It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.