William Faulkner Quotes
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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.
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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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Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
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I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
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Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
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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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How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
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By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
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Did you ever have a sister? did you?
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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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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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A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
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There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
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And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
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In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
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I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.