"When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.
More William Faulkner quotes
"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The y...
"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 penc...
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must g...
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks...
"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
"All of us [writers] failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if...
"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he ma...
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not h...
"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and...
"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studi...
"At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train hi...
"I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure ...
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings.