William Faulkner Quotes
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We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.
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I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
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As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
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I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.
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He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
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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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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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I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
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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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The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
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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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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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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
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Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
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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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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
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The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.