William Faulkner Quotes - Page 10

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• You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

  William Faulkner

  Sleep, Men, Orchids

  66 Copy quote

• 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”

  14 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Artist, Done, Stealing

  9 Copy quote

• There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

  William Faulkner

  Reality, Rocks, Maelstrom

  William Faulkner, Noel Polk (1987). “Absalom, Absalom!, typescript setting copy and miscellaneous material”, Facsimiles-Garl

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Art, History, Entertainment

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Jobs, Men, Signatures

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.135, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Bells, Way, Strive

  6 Copy quote

• True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.

  William Faulkner

  Poetry, Heaven, Earth

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Ideas, Fiction

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Thinking, Wish, Desperate

  4 Copy quote

• Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

  William Faulkner

  Strange, Folly, Monotonous

  William Faulkner (2011). “Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner”, p.91, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Over It

  "Requiem for a Nun". Book by William Faulkner, 1951.

  7 Copy quote

• A gentleman can live through anything.

  William Faulkner

  Courage, Gentleman

  William Faulkner (1999). “Novels, 1957-1962”

  8 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  World, Los Angeles, Plastic

  8 Copy quote

• ...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Men, Thinking

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

  4 Copy quote

• They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

  William Faulkner

  Men, White Man, Justice

  The Bear pt. 4 (1932)

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, People, One Day

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

  5 Copy quote

• There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.

  William Faulkner

  Drinking, Scotch, Whiskey

  20 Copy quote

• If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Dostoyevsky, Written

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

  11 Copy quote

• There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.

  William Faulkner

  Two, Months, Three

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Mother, Dream, Art

  In Paris Review Spring 1956, p. 30

  8 Copy quote

• When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.

  William Faulkner

  Martini, Bigger, Feels

  16 Copy quote

• The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

  William Faulkner

  Art, Powerful, Writing

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

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Strong, Children, Men

  1956 Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  8 Copy quote

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