William Faulkner Quotes
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
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He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
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To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
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I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.
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The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
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Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
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Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
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Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
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I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
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If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
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Civilization begins with distillation.
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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.