"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

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"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

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
— William Faulkner

"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

"Pouring out liquor is like burning books."
— 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

"My mother is a fish."
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

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

"Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing."
— William Faulkner

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

"There is no was."
— William Faulkner

"Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be."
— William Faulkner

"Wonder. Go on and wonder."
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

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

"I feel like a wet seed, wild in the hot, blind earth.

~Dewey Dell"
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."
— William Faulkner

"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

"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
— 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 (Absalom, Absalom!)

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
— 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

"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)

"You can't. You just have to."
— 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)

"The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on."
— William Faulkner (A Fable)

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"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

"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."
— William Faulkner

"He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond."
— William Faulkner

"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 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

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

"I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you."
— William Faulkner

"War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war."
— William Faulkner (A Fable)

"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."
— William Faulkner

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

"Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
— 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

"This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward."
— 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!)

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

"Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too."
— William Faulkner

"I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period."
— William Faulkner

"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."
— William Faulkner

"Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say."
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)