William Faulkner > Quotes

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“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. ”
― William Faulkner

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem For A Nun

“You cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you dont even try to.”
― William Faulkner

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

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

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

“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. ”
― William Faulkner

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

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

“I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner

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

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. ”
― William Faulkner

“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. ”
― William Faulkner

“The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”
― William Faulkner

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

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

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“My mother is a fish.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

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

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“There is no was.”
― William Faulkner

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

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

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

“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.”
― William Faulkner, The Town: A Novel of the Snopes Family

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

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

“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.”
― William Faulkner

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

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

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

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

“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.”
― William Faulkner

“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.”
― William Faulkner

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

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

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

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“You can't. You just have to.”
― William Faulkner

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“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.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews. ”
― William Faulkner

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.”
― William Faulkner