William Faulkner Quotes
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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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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's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
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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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We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
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That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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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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Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.
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If a story is in you, it has to come out.
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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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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
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Who gathers the withered rose?
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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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She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
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So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
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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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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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A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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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.