One of the primary duties of the staff of the Center for Faulkner Studies is to respond to inquiries about Faulkner's life and work. This page contains the quotes we are most often asked about, as well as what we consider to be among the most memorable lines in Faulkner's work and from the many interviews and speeches he gave in the course of his career. If your favorite Faulkner-ism does not appear on this page, please submit it.
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Art / Artists (see
also Writers/Writing) "Art reminds us of our youth, of that age when life
don't need to have her face lifted every so often for you to consider her
beautiful. That's about all the virtue there is in art: it's a kind of
Battle Creek, Michigan, of the spirit. And when it reminds us of youth, we
remember grief and forget time. That's something." [Art is] "A perversion . . . but a perversion that
builds Chartres and invents Lear is a pretty good thing." "Dante invented Beatrice, creating himself a maid that
life had not had time to create, and laid upon her frail and unbowed shoulders
the whole burden of man's history of his impossible heart's desire." "It is that Passion Week of the heart, that instant of
timeless beatitude which some never know, which some, I suppose, gain at will,
which others gain through an outside agency like alcohol . . .--that passive
state of the heart with which the mind, the brain, has nothing to do at all, in
which the hackneyed accidents that make up this world--love and life and death
and sex and sorrow--brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a
kind of splendid and timeless beauty." “The
aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and
hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves
again since it is life.” “The artist
doesn’t have time to listen to the critics.” “An artist
shouldn’t talk too much. If he talks then he works that much less.” “The artist is of
no importance. Only what he creates is important. . . .” “Art is not only
mankind’s supreme expression; it is also the salvation of mankind.” “The most important thing
is that man continues to create; just as woman continues to give birth.
Man will keep writing on pieces of paper, on scraps, on stones, as long
as he lives.”
“[I]n our culture there is really no place for
the artist.”
“[T]he artist is trying to match a dream of perfection.” “I
don’t think that an artist should be subsidized too much by anyone.
I think that he has got to be free, and even a little hardship may
be good for him.” “a
concept of a cosmos in miniature which Balzac and Dickens had” “I
read Don Quixote every
year.” “I rated Hemingway last not on the value of the product
at all but simply because of Hemingway having taught himself a pattern,
a method which he could use and he stuck to that without splashing
around to try to experiment.” Faulkner in the University, 206 “He was only second a critic, a sociologist, he was
mainly just a mad man.” Faulkner
in the University, 55
"Neither is the book which he now chooses the Tennyson: this time also he
chooses food for a man. It is Henry IV. . . ." “I’d rather read Shakespeare than see it played.” Tennyson "Soon
the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and
dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is
better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like
listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which does not even
need to not understand." [Speaking of the writers of his generation]:
“Of course Mark Twain is all of our grandfather.” Warren [Commenting
on All the King's Men]: “The
Cass Mastern story was a beautiful and moving piece. That was his novel.
The rest of it I would throw away.” “To
me the New Testament is full of ideas and I don’t know much about ideas.
The Old Testament is full of people, perfectly ordinary normal heroes and
blackguards just like everybody else nowadays, and I like to read the Old
Testament because it’s full of people, not ideas.” "I learned little save
that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or
reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed
and were to be learned about only from books." ". . . [I]t
takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you're losing. . .
." “[W]ith
me there is always a point in the book where the characters themselves rise up
and take charge and finish the job. . . .” “They are in my mind all the time. . . . I forget what
they did, but the character I don’t forget. . . .” “Once these people come to life, . . . they take off and
so the writer is going at a dead run behind them trying to put down what
they say and do in time. . . . They have taken charge of the story.
They tell it from then on.” “[T]hese people I invent and after that I just run along
and put down what they say and do.” “They are still in motion in my mind.
I can laugh at things they’re doing that I haven’t got around
to writing yet.”
“To me she was the
beautiful one, she was my heart’s darling.” “...his
very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a
being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn,
back-looking ghosts...” “[He]
loved death above all...loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and
almost perverted anticipation of death...” “Ishmael
is the witness in Moby Dick, as I am Quentin in The Sound and the
Fury.” “[H]e’s not prevalent but he’s everywhere.” “Ratliff will take what’s now and do the best he can
with it because he . . . possesses what you might call a moral,
spiritual eupepsia, that his digestion is good, all right, nothing
alarms him.” “Of
the Snopes, I’m terrified.” “[S]he was larger than life, she was too big
for this world.”
". . . a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he dont like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard, they are too busy because they dont know if they'll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired. . . ." Tull in As I Lay Dying, pp. 132-3 “Years
ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the
ladies into ghosts." “[T]he Christian legend is part of any Christian’s
background, especially the background of a country boy, a Southern country
boy.” “[The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man
has invented. . . .” “[T]he Christian religion has never harmed me.
I hope I have never harmed it.”
"Sunday evening prayer meeting. It has seemed to him always that at
that hour man approaches nearest of all to God, nearer than at any other
hour of all the seven days. Then alone, of all church gatherings, is
there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the
Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the
week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the
stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its
whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while
beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope." ". . . who seemed to
find in church some substitute for that which lacked upon the dinnertable.
. . ." "And what is the
church for, if not to help those who are foolish but who want truth?" ". . . that aptitude
and eagerness of the Anglo-Saxon for complete mystical acceptance of
immolated sticks and stones." “When the battle comes it always produces a Roland.” “I could just remember how
my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a
long time.” “I
can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the
body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds
of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the
fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single
tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” ". . . and then all of a
sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on
it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set
up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while
they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and
it doesn't matter." “…man leaped past life,
into where death was; he dashed into death and did not die, because when death
took a man, it took him just this side of the end of living” “But
you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have
exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that
could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away.” DEATH, DENIAL OF "And
so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them
something--a scrap of paper--something, anything, it not to mean anything in
itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away
or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it happened, be
remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to
another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might
make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die
someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish. . . ."
". . . to make that scratch, that undying mark on
the blank face of the oblivion to which we are all doomed. . . ." ". . . a madman who creates within his very
coffin walls his fabulous immeasurable Camelots and Carcassonnes."
"I reckon there is a time when even preachers
quit believing that God is going to change His plan and give victory where there
is nothing left to hang victory on." “[…] the end of wisdom
is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.” "I have no quarrel with education. I don't think it
hurts you much, except to make you unhappy and unfit for work. . . ." “I’ve never held with the mute inglorious Milton.” “I’m convinced that nobody can be taught anything,
that you must learn it.”
". . . [S]o much happens. Too much happens. . . . Man performs,
engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's
how he finds that he can bear anything. . . . That's what is so terrible.
That he can bear anything, anything."
“Just
to hate evil is not enough. You—somebody—has got to do something about it.” “I
think that every novelist is a failed poet.
I think he tries to write poetry first, then finds he can’t.
Then he tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after
poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up
novel-writing.” “All of us failed
to match our dream of perfection. So
I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” “There was them
others that never got their names in the poetry books, the next-best ones that
sweated and panted too. And being
the next-best to Paris is jest a next-best too, but it aint no bad next-best to
be. Not ever body had Helen, but then not even body lost her
neither.”
“France
and Italy are two of my favorite countries.
I feel Paris is a kind of home for me.
It’s a part of everyone’s cultural background.” “[France is] a
nation of practical and practicing pessimists.” “The
French have been in enough wars long enough to find out that the best way to get
shut of one is not to pay too much attention to it.” “Paris, the
civilised world’s eternal and splendid courtesan.” “You can’t have freedom unless you deserve it and work
to keep it.” The Future "Tomorrow night is
nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and
regrets." "Other nations seem to be
able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a
Boy Scout after all. We don't." ". . . because if there is a
God what the hell is He for." "After all, there must be some things for which God cannot be accused by man and held responsible. There must be." “So
what you need is to learn how to trust in God without depending on Him.
In fact, we need to fix things so He can depend on us for a while.
Then He wont need to waste Himself being everywhere at once.” “I think that any writer worth his salt is convinced
that he can create much better people than God can.” “No writer is satisfied with the folks that God creates.
He’s convinced he can do much better than that.” “I think that no writing will be too successful without
some conception of God, you can call Him by whatever name you want.” "I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in
the world for a lazy man." “[M]y idea is that no person is wholly good or wholly
bad, that all people in my belief try to be better than they are and
probably will be.” “I think that you really can’t say that any man is
good or bad.” “The federal government, I imagine, will do whatever the
most folks hollering the loudest at it insist on.” “the only place I was in where there was a sense of a
very distant past but there was nothing inimical in it.” "Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it.
What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?" “Between grief and nothing
I will take grief”
". . . thinking quietly
how 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."
". . . you knew it all already "How often have I lain beneath rain
on a strange roof, thinking of home." ". . . to respect anybody's
love for the land where he and his people were born and to understand that a man
would have to act as the land where he was born had trained him to act." "Folks are funny. They cant stick to one way of
thinking or doing anything unless they get a new reason for doing it ever so
often. And then when they do get a new reason, they are liable to change
anyhow." “[O]ne has got to belong to the human family, and to
take a responsible part in the human family.” “...nothing, nothing—war, grief,
hopelessness, despair—can last as long as man himself can last;...man
himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort
to; make the effort to believe in man and in hope.” “I decline to accept the
end of man. 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. I refuse to accept this.
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. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these
things. It is his privilege to help
man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and
hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory
of his past. The poet’s voice
need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to
help him endure and prevail.” “I have tremendous faith in man, in spite of all his faults and his
limitations. Man will overcome all
the horrors of an atomic war; he will never destroy mankind.” “Man does things at
times that make it seem that he is not worthy of surviving.
But he redeems himself at other times.
He shall prevail.” “But I am still convinced
that man is tougher than any darkness. That
man’s hope is the capacity to believe in man, his hope, his aspiration toward
a better human condition. The fact
that man always hopes toward a better human condition, I think that the purpose
of writing, of art, is a record.” “Maybe man is incapable of peace.
Maybe that is what differentiates man from a vegetable.” “[M]an progresses mechanically and technically much faster than he does spiritually. . . .” Faulkner in the University, 68 “I don’t think people are that different.
I think there is not a great deal of difference between Southerners
and Northerners and Americans and Russians and Chinese.” “[S]ince man’s behavior . . . has a way of repeating
itself, his problems never are problems that he never faced before.” “To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and,
considering man’s frailty . . . and . . . the ramshackle universe he
functions in, it’s . . . all irrational.” “[I]t
was so funny that his main job in telling it was to keep if from being as funny
as it really was, because if he ever let be as funny as it really was, everybody
and himself too would be laughing so hard they couldn’t hear him.” “There’s a case of the sorry, shabby world that
don’t quite please you, so you create one of your own. . . .” “[The writer] knows he has a short span of life,
that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and
he wants to leave a scratch on that wall—Kilroy was here—that somebody
a hundred, a thousand years later will see.”
“Only an individualist can be a first-rate writer.
He can’t belong to a group or a school and be a first-rate
writer.” “[A] first-rate scoundrel, like a first-rate
artist, he’s an individualist, and the pressure’s all against being an
individualist. . . .” “I doubt if people accomplish very much by banding
together. People accomplish
things by individual protest.” “[T]he individual is more important than any mass
or group he belongs to. .
. . [T]he individual is always more important than any state that he
belongs to.” “I think that no condition, no government can
destroy the will among a few to be individualists.” “.
. . innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is
innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but
because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent.” "[Uncle Buck and Uncle
Buddy] believed that land did not belong to people but that people belonged to
land and that the earth would permit them to live on and out of it and use it
only so long as they behaved and that if they did not behave right, it would
shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas."
“[A]ny language if it is not changing will not last
long. That is, the only alternative
to change and progress is death.” “.
. . to a lawyer, if it aint complicated it don’t matter whether it works or
not because if it aint complicated up enough it aint right and so even if it
works, you don’t believe it.” Learning to Write (see also Writers/Writing) “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.” “That’s a very good way to learn the craft of
writing—from reading.” “[A writer] must teach
himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself
that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the
old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any
story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion
and sacrifice.” “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 writers, but he learns it—you can’t teach it.” “Nothing
can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first rate writer.
If a man is not a first rate writer, there’s not anything can help it
much.” “The
young writer would be a fool to follow a theory.
Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”
"How do our lives ravel out into the
no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old
compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious
attitudes, dead gestures of dolls."
". . . probably by that time
he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure,
darkness. . . ." “Life is not
interested in good and evil.” “. . . anything
is better than Nothing, even lice.” “Because the
tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in
order to be life. . . .” “[L]ife is not so
much motion as an inventless repetition of motion. . . .” “But you cant be alive
forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the
possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have
been invented and created just to be thrown away.” Literature (SEE ALSO AUTHORS)
“The people I know are other farmers and horse people
and hunters, and we talk about horses and dogs and guns and what to do
about this hay crop or this cotton crop, not about literature.” “To me the book is the important thing, it don’t
matter who wrote it.” ". . . [S]ome day you are
bound to fall in love. They just wouldn't beat you that way. It
would be like if God had got Jesus born and saw that He had the carpenter tools
and then never gave Him anything to build with them." “.
. . love, something worthy to match not just today’s innocent and terrified
and terrifying passion, but tomorrow’s strength and capacity for serenity and
growth and accomplishment and the realisation of hope and at last the
contentment of one mutual peace and one mutual conjoined old age.” “...you don't commit
suicide when you're disappointed in love. You write a book.” Mankind
"Poor man. Poor mankind."
MEMORY
"Memory believes before knowing remembers.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
“[T]here are some men who are incorrigibly and invincibly bachelor no matter how often they marry, just as some men are doomed and emasculate husbands if they never find a woman to take them.” Charles Mallison, quoting Gavin Stevens, The Town, Chapter 3 “There
aren’t any morals. . . . People just do the best they can.” ". . . how a man's name,
which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of
what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time." The Past "A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living
folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead
ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape
from." “The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.” “[N]o man is himself, he is the sum of his past.” “There is no such thing really as was because the past
is.” “[M]aybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when
the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken
glass of experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things—that
was peace. Maybe peace is not
is, but was.” "You cannot know yet
whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing." “. . . he and Mr.
Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing; it just wasn’t with the same
eye.” “We went on, in that
strange, fairly sinister suspension of twilight in which I believed that I could
still see Sam Fathers back there, sitting on his wooden block, definite,
immobile, and complete, like something looked upon after a long time in a
preservative bath in a museum. That was it. I was just twelve then, and I would
have to wait until I had passed on and through and beyond the suspension of
twilight.” "Remember, all Tolstoy said about Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. That's all he ever said to describe her. And every man has a different idea of what's beautiful. And it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree." "Lion in the Garden," 128 “[P]oets are almost
always wrong about facts. That’s
because they are not really interested in facts:
only in truth. . . .” “Who can say how much of the good poetry in the world
has come out of madness . . .?” [Faulkner's Definition of Poetry]:
“It’s some moving, passionate moment of the human condition
distilled to its absolute essence.”
"The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose
feet are shaped like the cobbler's feet, can wear; while the old boys
turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear." ". . .
“What little of psychology I know the characters I have
invented and playing poker have taught me.
Freud I’m not familiar with.” “You write a story to tell about people, man in his
constant struggle with his own heart, with the hearts of others, or with
his environment. It’s man
in the ageless, eternal struggles which we inherit and we go through as
though they’d never happened before, shown for a moment in a dramatic
instant of the furious motion of being alive, that’s all any story is.
You catch this fluidity which is human life and you focus a light
on it and you stop it long enough for people to be able to see it.” Race/civil rights “I
think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of
course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the
poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont
show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a
few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of
African kings.” “All men are born with the
equal right to attain freedom, not to be given freedom, but the equal right to
earn freedom and keep it as they are responsible and are strong and are
truthful.” “As someone has said,
apparently the difficulty is the Mississippian don’t want the Negro to sit
down with him. They can stand up,
that’s all right, they can ride in the same elevator, but they can’t sit in
the same church. Maybe if everybody
stood up in church, the Negro could come in too…” “The Negro is not going to wait any longer.” “When it’s jest money
and power a man wants, there is usually some place where he will stop. . . .
But when it’s respectability he finds out he wants and has got to have,
there aint nothing he wont do to get it and then keep it.” ". . . the universal benefit of religion is
that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday morning." ". . . [I]t aint for me to say that you are
wrong. And I dont reckon it's for you to say that I am wrong, even if I
am." "When something is new and hard and bright, there ought
to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe
things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the
edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say,
That was not done before and it cannot be done again." "Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when
a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure
crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him
that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way
the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it." The South ". . . the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts" Absalom, Absalom!, Vintage Corrected Text, p. 4 "You cant understand it.
You would have to be born there." “I
dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont
hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the
iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” Storytelling (see also Writers/Writing) ". . . the two of them
creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and
talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows,
were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn
of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too . . ." “Success is
feminine. It’s like a woman. You treat her with contempt and
she’ll come after you, all fawning and eager, but chase after her and she’ll
scorn you.” "Maybe nothing ever happens
once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on
water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool
attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool. . . ." “A monument only
says At least I got this far while a
footprint says This is where I was when I moved again.” “Father said clocks
slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little
wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life." “My,
my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two
months, and now it's already Tennessee.” “.
. . between what did happen and what ought to happened, I don’t never have
trouble picking ought.” "...some things...just
have to be whether they are or not." “Courage
and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch
the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes the truth, as far as we know
truth.” “[T]he artist’s prerogative . . . is to emphasize, to
underline, to blow up facts, distort facts in order to state a truth.” WAR ". . .
what is probably the most moving mass-sight of all human mass-experience, far
more so than the spectacle of so many virgins going to be sacrificed to some
heathen Principle, some Priapus--the sight of young men, the light quick bones,
the bright gallant deluded blood and flesh dressed in a martial glitter of brass
and plumes, marching away to a battle." ". . . since
neither [of them] were the first young men to believe (or at least apparently
act on the assumpion) that wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of
settling youth's private difficulties and discontents." “[…] the end of wisdom
is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.” ". . . women have to be
strong and should not be held blameable for what they do with or for or because
of men, since God knew that being anybody's wife was a tricky enough business." "They lead beautiful
lives--women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated
from, all reality." ". . . maybe he had learned . . . that you
cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar
you dont even try to. . . ."
".
. . women don’t care whether they are facts or not just so they fit, and men
don’t care whether they fit or not just so they are facts.” “Women aren’t
interested in poets’ dreams. They
are interested in facts.” "Women only use other
people's codes of honour." “Once a bitch always a
bitch, what I say.” "That was when I learned that words are no good; that words
dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at." “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 anymore than for pride
or fear.” “... 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.” “. . . [P]eople to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words
too.” Writers/Writing (see also Art/Artists, Storytelling, and Learning to Write) "I thought then of the woman
of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake and of the men who have
written of her, and I realised the immitigable chasm between all life and all
print--that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they
can't, write about it." “The writer’s only
responsibility is to his art. He
will be completely ruthless if he is a good one....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.” Commenting on his own
stories: “In
my own estimation, none of them are good enough, that’s why I have spent
thirty years writing another one, hoping that one would be good enough....the one
that caused me the most anguish and is to me the finest failure is The Sound and
the Fury. That’s the one I feel
most tender toward.” “The writer in America
isn’t a part of the culture of this country.
He’s like a fine dog. People
like him around, but he’s of no use.” “Folks try hard to
understand. The public expects too much of present-day novelists.
Read a book and let it go at that. You
can read it in two days. It takes
months to write one.” “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 that, only then does he take up novel writing.” “[In a novel] you can be more careless, you can
put more trash in it and be excused for it.
In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to
be almost exactly right.” “What
matters is at the end of life, when you’re about to pass into oblivion, that
you’ve at least scratched ‘Kilroy was here,’ on the last wall of the
universe.” “A
writer needs 3 things: experience, observation, imagination, any two of which,
at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” “The
writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All
he needs is a pencil, and some paper.” “I
am not a literary man but only a writer. I
don’t get any pleasure from talking shop.” “And who better to save man’s humanity than the
writer, the poet, the artist, since who should fear the loss of it more since
the humanity of man is the artist’s life blood.”
“.
. . this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters—ambition and
fear and lust and courage and abnegation and pity and honor and sin and
pride—all bound, precarious and ramshackle, held together by the web, the
iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but withal yet dedicated to his
dreams.” “Beginning
with Sartoris I discovered that my own
little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would
never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into
apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to
its absolute top.” “I
like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the
Universe; that, as small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away, the
universe itself would collapse.” Random Musings “[…] if I were
reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard.
Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him.
He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” On Why He
Left His Job at the Post Office: “I
reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank
God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch
who's got two cents to buy a stamp.”
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Art/Artists AUTHORS The Bible BOOKS CHARACTER Characters children Civil War Christianity CHURCH Crisis Death DEFEAT Dreams Education ENDURANCE Evil Failure France Freedom future god good & evil government Greece grief HABIT Heaven HISTORY HOME Humankind humor imagination immortality individualism innocence LAND language lawyers learning to write life Literature love MANKIND meddling Men Morality NAMES The Past peace Perspective poets/poetry PRESBYTERIANS PRIDE psychology purpose Race/civil Rights RELIGION |