Top 382 Quotes & Sayings by William Faulkner - Page 3

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

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.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry ?rst, ?nds 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.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.

You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

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.

I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.

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.

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.

I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.

To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.

That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.