William Faulkner Quotes
-
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.
-
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
-
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
-
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
-
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
-
The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
-
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
-
Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
-
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
-
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
-
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?
-
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
-
All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.
-
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
-
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
-
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
-
She was the captain of her soul.
-
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.
-
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.
-
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
-
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
-
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
-
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
-
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.