William Faulkner Quotes
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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
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Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
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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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We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
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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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'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
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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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Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
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The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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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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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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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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I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
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Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
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...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
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The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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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.