William Faulkner quotes:

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.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

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.

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's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

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.

Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

...surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

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.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

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.

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] 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.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

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.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.

I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized"

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

Luster returned, wearing a stiff new straw hat with a colored band and carrying a cloth cap. The hat seemed to isolate Luster's skull, in the beholder's eye as a spotlight would, in all its individual planes and angles. So peculiarly individual was its shape that at first glance the hat appeared to be on the head of someone standing immediately behind Luster.

And i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was"

I decline to accept the end of man.

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.

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. 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.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

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!

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away

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.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

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.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.

Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

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.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

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.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

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.

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.

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

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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

He [the 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 old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

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.

I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

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.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil,

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

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.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

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-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

Meet Mrs. Bundren

And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.

My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

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.

he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.

It's a comfortable thing, music is.

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.

All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

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.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.