70 quotes
I told you once how I believe it isn't love that dies, it's the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn't deserve the chance any more to love.
The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939)
... 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.
Light in August (1932)
I most sincerely wish to go on record as being unalterably opposed to Francisco Franco and fascism, to all violations of the legal government and outrages against the people of Republican Spain.
The young man or woman writing today has forgotten 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. He must learn them again.
... between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought.
The Town (1957)
... maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.
... life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion.
The Mansion (1959)
... women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.
The Town (1957)
... so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
She accepted that—not reconciled: accepted-- as though there is a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God that is all; at least I know it all.
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn't important, it wasn't really there.
The Mansion (1959)
If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
Paris Review interview (1958)
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.
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
You are my brother.
No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven "sure-fire" literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.
The Mansion (1959)
... leaving as next by seniority Stuart that gallant man born apparently already horsed and sabred and already knowing all there was to know about war except the slogging and brutal stupidity of it...
Go Down, Moses (1942)
"There is no such thing," meditated Bill, "as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damnfool if he doesn't."
William Faulkner of Oxford (1965)