William Faulkner Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

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

  Quoted in Paris Review, Spring 1956

  84 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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”

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  14 Copy quote

• I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Thinking, People

  William Faulkner (1955). “Mosquitoes”, New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

  William Faulkner

  Sports, Gentleman, Kentuckians

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.92, Modern Library

  10 Copy quote

• When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Ideas, Simplicity

  7 Copy quote

• ...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

  12 Copy quote

• 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”

  11 Copy quote

• To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

  William Faulkner

  Art, Men, Hollywood

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  William Faulkner

  Beach, Ocean, Names

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Squares, Facts

  William Faulkner (1966). “The Sound and the Fury”

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• I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

  William Faulkner

  Taken, Thinking, Together

  4 Copy quote

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

  William Faulkner

  Ideas, Style, Should

  8 Copy quote

• 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”

  15 Copy quote

• The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

  William Faulkner

  Night, Whiskey, Scene

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.

  William Faulkner

  Selfish, Blow, Thinking

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

  4 Copy quote

• They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

  William Faulkner

  Voice, People, Desire

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.117, Modern Library

  19 Copy quote

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