A Quote by William Faulkner

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

William Faulkner

Quote Topics

Bricklaying Interested Surgery Take Technique Up Writer

Quote Author

William Faulkner
American - Writer
September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

Edward Abbey

I don't want to fight aging; I want to take good care of myself, but plastic surgery and all that? I'm not interested.

Christine Lahti

I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.

Ali MacGraw

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

Marianne Moore

I try to show good technique - boxing technique, wrestling technique, jiu jitsu technique.

Andrei Arlovski

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

Flannery O'Connor

I was sure I wanted to grow up to be either a veterinarian or a writer. In fact, I worked for a vet during high school, doing everything from cleaning cages to assisting in surgery.

K. A. Applegate

My son had a tumour on his neck. We went for surgery but it failed because the tumour was difficult to remove. Later, we went to New York for his surgery. I was scared as his first operation had failed. I went to church and met a pastor. He told me to go ahead, God would take care of everything. And the surgery was successful.

Johnny Lever

I don't want to make a comfortable film. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in answering people's questions; I'm interested in posing questions. I'm interested in sparking a conversation between two people about what something means. That's enough for me, as a writer and as a director.

Sam Levinson

As the soul of the film it has to work for you otherwise you don't take it up at all. It takes two years of your life, you better be interested in it. When you know it's something you can do well, that's when you take it up.

Mani Ratnam

My first five years, I missed a ton of games. I had elbow surgery twice; I had wrist surgery, knee surgery.

Mike Fisher

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.

Terence McKenna

Honestly, depending on what stage I'm at in my life, my opinion on plastic surgery changes. I've never been against plastic surgery - I'm against bad plastic surgery. I'm against the overuse of plastic surgery.

Michelle Pfeiffer

Yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft had surgery to remove his gall bladder. Doctors say the surgery was difficult because Ashcroft refused to take his clothes off.