William Faulkner Quotes

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This — the actual pistols — was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

...he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

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.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

[Light in August]

… when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. — Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

Look. You are playing poker (I assume you know poker, or at least — like a lot of people — anyway play it.) You draw cards. When you do that, you affirm two things: either that you have something to draw to, or are willing to support to your last cent the fact that you have not. You dont draw and then throw the cards in because they are not what you wanted, expected, hoped for; not just for the sake of your own soul and pocket-book, but for the sake of the others in the game, who have likewise assumed that unspoken obligation.

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.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

... maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.'''

Bad health is the primary reason for all life. Created by disease, within putrefaction, into decay