William Faulkner Quotes

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

~ William Faulkner

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

~ William Faulkner

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

~ William Faulkner

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

~ 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. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

~ William Faulkner

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

~ William Faulkner

Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago

~ William Faulkner

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless--a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.

~ William Faulkner

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

~ William Faulkner

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

~ William Faulkner

Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs

~ William Faulkner

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

~ William Faulkner

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

~ William Faulkner

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

~ William Faulkner

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

~ William Faulkner

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.

~ William Faulkner

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.

~ William Faulkner

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

~ William Faulkner