William Faulkner Quotes

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

~ William Faulkner

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

~ William Faulkner

he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit.

~ William Faulkner

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

~ William Faulkner

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

~ William Faulkner

I reckon if there’s ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man’s good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.

~ William Faulkner

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

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

~ William Faulkner

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. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

~ William Faulkner

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

~ William Faulkner

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.]

~ William Faulkner

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

~ William Faulkner

And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had 'phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed to dream of her brokenly.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ 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

And so I told myself to take that one. 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. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.

~ William Faulkner

Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.

~ 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

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.

~ William Faulkner

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.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ 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

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

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

~ William Faulkner

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless, someone will always buy him drink or weapons.

~ William Faulkner