William Faulkner Quotes
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Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
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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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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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That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.
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I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.
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I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
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The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
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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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I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
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It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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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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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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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
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Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
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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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...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
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The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
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I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.