William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulknerwas an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 September 1897
CityNew Albany, MS
dog air breathing
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
thinking white people
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.
lying liars men
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
children adults accepting
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
advice fool inability
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
patience long waiting
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
aghast looks madness
...surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..
men thinking helping
And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
real past history
You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
men order shapes
ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
writing ideas fiction
With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.
running artist blood
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.
writing men talking
'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
mistake errors people
Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.