William Faulkner

William Faulkner

Novelist, Poet, Playwright

William Faulkner was an American writer known for his complex narratives and innovative use of time and memory, particularly in works like 'As I Lay Dying.'

Men Writing Thinking People Long Art
Born
September 25, 1897
Died
July 6, 1962
Quotes
383
Rank
#170

Quote collection

William Faulkner quotes (page 10 of 20)

383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

William Faulkner Novelist, Poet, Playwright
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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."

Art Horse Hands
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William Faulkner Novelist, Poet, Playwright
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"The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten."

Heartbreak Lost Love Forever
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William Faulkner Novelist, Poet, Playwright
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"I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

Hate Dark Air
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William Faulkner Novelist, Poet, Playwright
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"A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn."

Wind Bird Pairs
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"…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who."

Lying Thinking Light
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William Faulkner Novelist, Poet, Playwright
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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."

Boys July Wind
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"I don't want money badly enough to work for it."

Want Enough
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"A man is the sum of his misfortunes."

Men Misfortunes
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"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."

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

World Los Angeles Plastic
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"They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph"

Beach Ocean Names
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"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

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

Ideas Style Should
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"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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."

Mother Dream Art
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"Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing."

Fun Children People
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"People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty."

Strong Children Men
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"Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."

South
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"I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear."

Time Long Mind
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"The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies."

Sunset Tea Dies
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