William Faulkner Quotes

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

I am always trying to write.

I think too many people edit themselves way too soon. There's plenty of time to edit, and it is a crucial part of it all, too.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

If you want to be a writer, I have two pieces of advice. One is to be a reader. I think that's one of the most important parts of learning to write. The other piece of advice is 'Just do it!' Don't think about it, don't agonize, sit down and write.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

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.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.