William Faulkner Quotes
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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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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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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.
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You can't. You just have to.
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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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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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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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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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Caddy smelled like trees.
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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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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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She was the captain of her soul.
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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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A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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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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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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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.