Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
William Faulkner
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
Better
Rewrite
Express
Material
Absolutely
Materials
Unless
Sure
More quotes by William Faulkner
That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Only when the clock stops does time come to life
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
William Faulkner
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 problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
William Faulkner
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
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
William Faulkner
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
William Faulkner
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport he is a Kentuckian too.
William Faulkner
Poor man. Poor mankind.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
No one individual can tell the truth.
William Faulkner
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner