William Faulkner Quotes
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The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
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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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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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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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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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I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
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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 believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
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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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History is not was, it is.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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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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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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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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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.