William Faulkner Quotes

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

~ William Faulkner

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.

~ William Faulkner

The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. Catch it! a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. Play something! the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; play! Play!

~ William Faulkner

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

~ William Faulkner

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.(on Mark Twain)

~ William Faulkner

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.

~ William Faulkner

The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.

~ William Faulkner

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

~ William Faulkner

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

~ William Faulkner

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

~ William Faulkner

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

~ William Faulkner

Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

~ William Faulkner

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...

~ William Faulkner

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

~ William Faulkner

... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

~ William Faulkner

I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.

~ William Faulkner

You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...

~ William Faulkner

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.

~ William Faulkner

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

~ William Faulkner

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

~ William Faulkner

Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.

~ William Faulkner

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

~ William Faulkner

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

~ William Faulkner

Listen: it’s got to be all honeymoon, always. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us.

~ William Faulkner

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.

~ William Faulkner

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the 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. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

~ William Faulkner

I will never lie again.

~ William Faulkner

And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.

~ William Faulkner

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

~ William Faulkner

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

~ William Faulkner

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.

~ William Faulkner

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism--unless the criticized isn't within earshot.

~ William Faulkner

And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.

~ William Faulkner

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