William Faulkner Quotes
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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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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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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She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
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Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
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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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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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She was the captain of her soul.
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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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Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
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The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
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You can't. You just have to.
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A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
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A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
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Caddy smelled like trees.
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
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I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.