Quotes from William Faulkner

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

Love doesn't die; the men and women do.

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. 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.

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

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

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

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

He just thought quietly, 'So this is love. I see, I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. [...] 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

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.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.

She was the captain of her soul

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

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

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

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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.

My, my. A body does get around.

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 older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

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

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.