Quote

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

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
Behavior
Europe
Artist
Form
America
Excuse

More quotes by William Faulkner

Image
It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours he can't drink for eight hours he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
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
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner
Image
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
William Faulkner
Image
The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
William Faulkner
Image
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
William Faulkner
Image
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
William Faulkner
Image
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
William Faulkner
Image
He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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
If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner
Image
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
Image
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
William Faulkner
Image
I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.
William Faulkner
Image
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.
William Faulkner
Image
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