William Faulkner Quotes
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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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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
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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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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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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'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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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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Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.
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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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No one individual can tell the truth.
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
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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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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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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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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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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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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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I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
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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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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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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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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
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With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.