William Faulkner Quotes
-
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
-
We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.
-
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
-
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
-
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
-
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.
-
You can't. You just have to.
-
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
-
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.
-
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
-
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
-
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
-
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.
-
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
-
In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
-
I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
-
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
-
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
-
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
-
Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?