Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
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
Moments
Fiction
Stories
Single
Caused
Ideas
Simply
Explain
Matter
Happened
Begins
Writing
Working
Mental
Story
Picture
Moment
Follow
Idea
Usually
More quotes by William Faulkner
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner
I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
William Faulkner
Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
William Faulkner
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
William Faulkner
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
William Faulkner
It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
William Faulkner
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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
No one individual can tell the truth.
William Faulkner
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
William Faulkner
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
William Faulkner
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
William Faulkner
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
William Faulkner
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William Faulkner
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
William Faulkner
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
William Faulkner
