William Faulkner Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
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The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
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I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
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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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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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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.
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History is not was, it is.
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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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I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
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Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
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She was the captain of her soul.
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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
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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.
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The past is never dead. It's not even past.
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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
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Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.