William Faulkner Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can't. You just have to.
-
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
-
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
-
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
-
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.
-
Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
-
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.
-
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
-
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
-
He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread.
-
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
-
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
-
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
-
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
-
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
-
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
-
Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
-
No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
-
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
-
There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.
-
...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
-
He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.