William Faulkner Quotes
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That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
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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.
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You can't. You just have to.
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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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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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I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.
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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?
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I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
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He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
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That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.
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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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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.
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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.
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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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It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
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So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.