William Faulkner


poet William Faulkner

William Faulkner Quotes

  • ''My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).
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  • ''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 (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).
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  • ''The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).
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  • ''If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Interview in Writers at Work, First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).
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  • ''She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist, Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), U.S. screenwriter, Jules (Julius Grinnell) Furthmann (1888-1960), U.S. screenwriter, and Howard Hawks. Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), The Big Sleep (1946). To the butler about Carmen Sternwood.
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  • ''It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. author, screenwriter, Harry Kurnitz, screenwriter, Harold Jack Bloom, screenwriter, and Howard Hawks. Princess Nelipher (Joan Collins), Land of the Pharaohs, 1955. Admiring the vast gold treasure that Pharaoh (Jack Hawkins) plans to have buried with him.
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  • ''The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Speech to UNESCO Commission. quoted in New York Times (Oct. 3, 1959).
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  • ''Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly ... is having to accept it.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist. Temple Drake, in Requiem for a Nun, act 2, sc. 1.
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  • ''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 (1897-1962), U.S. novelist, Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), U.S. screenwriter, Jules (Julius Grinnell) Furthmann (1888-1960), U.S. screenwriter, and Howard Hawks. General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), The Big Sleep (1946). Wheelchair-bound General Sternwood interviewing private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) for a job.
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  • ''You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.''
    William Faulkner (1897-1962), U.S. novelist, Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), U.S. screenwriter, Jules (Julius Grinnell) Furthmann (1888-1960), U.S. screenwriter, and Howard Hawks. General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), The Big Sleep (1946). Wheelchair-bound General Sternwood interviewing private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) for a job.
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Best Poem of William Faulkner

A Poplar

Why do you shiver there
Between the white river and the road?
You are not cold,
With the sun light dreaming about you;
And yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as though
To draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness.

You are a young girl
Trembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty,
A white objective girl
Whose clothing has been forcibly taken away from her.

Read the full of A Poplar

After Fifty Years

Her house is empty and her heart is old,
And filled with shades and echoes that deceive
No one save her, for still she tries to weave
With blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold.
Once all men's arms rose up to her, ‘tis told,
And hovered like white birds for her caress:
A crown she could have had to bind each tress
Of hair, and her sweet arms the Witches' Gold.

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