William Faulkner Quotes
-
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.
-
. . .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.
-
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.
-
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
-
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.
-
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
-
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
-
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
-
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.
-
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
-
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
-
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
-
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
-
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.
-
If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it.
-
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
-
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
-
They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.
-
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
-
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
-
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
-
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
-
You have to write badly in order to write well.
-
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.