An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner
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William Faulkner quotes
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
A gentleman can live through anything.
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.
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we callwhat he writes fiction.
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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 doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
I decline to accept the end of man.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
Others have done it before me. I can, too.
Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.
Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
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.
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.
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