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William Faulkner Quotes - Page 9

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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

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.

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

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

William Faulkner
Running, Artist, Blood

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

William Faulkner
Writing, Artist, Solitude

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

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

William Faulkner
Care, Said, Don't Care

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”

...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

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”

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

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

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

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

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

William Faulkner
Ideas, Style, Should

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”

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

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”

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”

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

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

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

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

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

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”

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

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