William Faulkner Quotations | Page 3

You can't. You just have to.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

You have to write badly in order to write well.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

No one individual can tell the truth.

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.