William Faulkner: Trending quotes

“Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”

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

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

“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.”

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world… would do this, it would change the earth.”

“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.”