William Faulkner Quotes
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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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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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To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
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I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
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For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away.
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It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
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Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
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No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
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What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.
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This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
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A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
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Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
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Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in a novel and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
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My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
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Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
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I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.