William Faulkner Quotes

The past is never dead-it is not even past.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanic...

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can...

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Mos...

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. ...

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting ...

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so...

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yours...

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too b...

You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies h...

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxfor...

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so ...

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 splend...

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's in...

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even tr...

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that th...

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.....

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying...

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist...

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer th...

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

I decline to accept the end of men... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He...

One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work....

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just lik...

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the y...

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I mu...

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failu...

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heart...

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the y...

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that...

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about wor...

When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

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

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults...

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone amo...

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, ...

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock ha...

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingw...

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so...

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure...

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

now i can get them teeth

My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can ...

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood...

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes simi...

And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.

Too much happens ... Man performs engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's...

Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual peopl...

[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually...

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

Civilization begins with distillation

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your co...

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fi...

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpos...

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the sa...

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I don...

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters with...

...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...

Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil convic...

I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with H...

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that ...

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watche...

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at ...

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont tak...

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay ...

... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse h...

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon w...

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw...

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his sh...

There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt ...

Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me ...

But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motion...

And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or wom...

Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and ...