Quote

When ideas come, I write them when they don't come, I don't.

William Faulkner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Ideas
Come
Writing
Simplicity
Write

More quotes by William Faulkner

Image
The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
William Faulkner
Image
Truth that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
William Faulkner
Image
Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
William Faulkner
Image
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
William Faulkner
Image
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
William Faulkner
Image
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.
William Faulkner
Image
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner
Image
The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
William Faulkner
Image
No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner
Image
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
William Faulkner
Image
The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
William Faulkner
Image
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.
William Faulkner
Image
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
William Faulkner
Image
Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
William Faulkner
Image
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest
William Faulkner
Image
You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
William Faulkner
Image
I am not one of those women who can stand things.
William Faulkner