William Faulkner Quotes
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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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 scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
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Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
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…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
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One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
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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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Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
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He the writer must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers.
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Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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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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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
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At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.
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A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.
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When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
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It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
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Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.
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. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.