William Faulkner Quotes

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

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

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

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”

“I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”

“If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time”

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

“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

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

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

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”

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

“That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading.”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”

“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.”

“No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.”

“If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.”

“There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp.”

“When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean.”

“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory.”

“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.”

“Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”

“Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was”

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”

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

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”

“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”

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

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

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”

“It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

“My mother is a fish.”

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

“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”

“Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar…”

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.”

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

“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.”

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

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

“A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….”

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

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

“There is no was.”

“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”

“It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.”

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”

“A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.”

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”

“She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.”