William Faulkner Quotes

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

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.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

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.

You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

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.

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

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

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.

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.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.

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 back either. Just refuse to bear them.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

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

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that 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.

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.

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.

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.

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

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.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

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.

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

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

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.

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

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

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.

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

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

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

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.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

A gentleman can live through anything.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

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