William Faulkner Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds 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.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Trying, Novelists

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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

  William Faulkner

  Regret, Habit, Idle

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.79, Modern Library

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

  William Faulkner

  Men, Long, Childhood

  William Faulkner (1951). “Absalom, Absalom!”

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• The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

  William Faulkner

  Jobs, Artist, Best Job

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Dust, Desire

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.126, Modern Library

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

  William Faulkner

  Loneliness

  William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

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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.

  William Faulkner

  Inspiration, Saws, Heard

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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.

  William Faulkner

  God, Dream, Men

  William Faulkner, Paul Gardner, Eric Mottram (1976). “A Faulkner perspective: a companion-guide to the limited first edition of the Selected letters of William Faulkner”

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• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Running, Distance, Space

  William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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• I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Long, Littles

  Francis Lee Utley, William Faulkner, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney (1964). “Bear, man, & God: seven approaches to William Faulkner's The bear”

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• I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Reality, Bereavement

  William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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• ...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.

  William Faulkner

  Thinking, Two, People

  William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

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• I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.

  William Faulkner

  Thinking, Giving, Promise

  William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.101, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Doctors, Cyclones

  William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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• 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

  William Faulkner

  People, And Love, Sound

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

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• It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.

  William Faulkner

  Ambition, Leaving, Individual

  William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). “Selected letters of William Faulkner”, Vintage

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• 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

  Believe, Artist, Vanity

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Writing, Character

  William Faulkner, Joseph L. Fant, Robert Paul Ashley (1964). “Faulkner at West Point”, p.101, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Rocks, Talking

  Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, originally delivered December 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

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• It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.

  William Faulkner

  Running, Husband, College

  William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.125, W. W. Norton & Company

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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.

  William Faulkner

  Church, Inward, Bells

  William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

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

  William Faulkner

  Men, Dolls, Sawdust

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.172, Modern Library

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• In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.

  William Faulkner

  Sleep, Rooms, Strange

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

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

  William Faulkner

  Ideas, Style, Should

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• He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....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.

  William Faulkner

  Pride, Talking, Long

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

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