William Faulkner Quotes
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Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
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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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The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
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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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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
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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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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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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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I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
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She was the captain of her soul.
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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 believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
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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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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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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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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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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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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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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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It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
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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.