An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
WILLIAM FAULKNERThe end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
More William Faulkner Quotes
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Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
She was the captain of her soul
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
All l mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Wonder. Go on and wonder.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER