Quotes from William Faulkner

You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

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.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.