William Faulkner Quotes - Page 14

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• I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Thinking, People

  7 Copy quote

• Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

  William Faulkner

  Color, Heaven, Cottages

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

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• He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

  William Faulkner

  Prayer, Thinking, Habit

  William Faulkner (1985). “Light in August”, Vintage

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• It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.

  William Faulkner

  Death, Men, Thinking

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

  4 Copy quote

• I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.

  William Faulkner

  Hate, Moving, Men

  William Faulkner (1946). “The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying”, New York : The Modern library

  4 Copy quote

• The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

  William Faulkner

  Artist, Fabric, Littles

  12 Copy quote

• You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

  William Faulkner

  Men

  Jack L. Capps, William Faulkner (1979). “Light in August: a concordance to the novel”

  4 Copy quote

• Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

  William Faulkner

  Tennessee, Mexico, Memphis

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.11, Modern Library

  62 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Technique, Bricklaying, Surgery

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

  7 Copy quote

• Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

  William Faulkner

  Lonely, Grieving, Knowing

  William Faulkner (1967). “Light in August”, Random House Inc

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• All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Possible And Impossible, Perfection

  1956 On his generation of writers. Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  11 Copy quote

• It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Lust, Proof

  William Faulkner (2011). “Selected Short Stories”, p.270, Modern Library

  52 Copy quote

• The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.

  William Faulkner

  Needs, Paper, Economic

  4 Copy quote

• Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

  William Faulkner

  Home, August, Air

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.123, Modern Library

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• Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Substitutes, Something Better

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.169, Modern Library

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• It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

  William Faulkner

  Children, Emotional, Long

  8 Copy quote

• People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.

  William Faulkner

  Opportunity, Names, Ideas

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

  4 Copy quote

• Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilizing the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.

  William Faulkner

  Women, Drawing, People

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• Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.

  William Faulkner

  Fall, Littles, Sound

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

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• And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

  William Faulkner

  Lonely, Deep Water, Wind

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.82, Modern Library

  54 Copy quote

• Poor man. Poor mankind.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Poor, Mankind

  Francis Lee Utley, William Faulkner, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney (1971). “Bear, man, and God: eight approaches to William Faulkner's The bear”, Random House Inc

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• The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

  William Faulkner

  Art, Responsibility

  Quoted in Paris Review, Spring 1956

  4 Copy quote

• What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Should, Obituary

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• A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Hurt, Hair

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.812, Modern Library

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• So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Men, Imagination

  William Faulkner (2013). “Requiem For A Nun”, p.230, Random House

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