William Faulkner Quotes
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
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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.
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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.
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A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
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You can't. You just have to.
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The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
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I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.
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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.
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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.
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Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
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...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
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If a story is in you, it has to come out.
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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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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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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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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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She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
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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.