William Faulkner Quotes

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

Who will dare say he has defined art?

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

The general ideas which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in poetry... every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination... but a painter, when he represents Eve on canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

While truth is ultimately convergent, beauty is ultimately divergent. No one can and no one should tell anyone else what that person should consider beautiful.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.