William Faulkner Quotes
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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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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
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Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
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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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The past is never dead. It's not even past.
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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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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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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 writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
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You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.
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We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.
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When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
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Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
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Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
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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.