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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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.
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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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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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My, my. A body does get around.
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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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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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If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
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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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Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
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I listen to the voices.
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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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When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
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...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
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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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You men,' she says. 'You durn men.
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You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
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Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.