William Faulkner Quotes
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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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We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
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If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
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She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
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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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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.
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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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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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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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It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
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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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You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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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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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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Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
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Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
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Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
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The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
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And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
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When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
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A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.