William Faulkner Quotes

Biography

Type: Nobel Prize–winning novelist

Born: September 25, 1897

Died: July 6, 1962

William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize–winning novelist of the American South who wrote challenging prose and created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He is best known for such novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying".

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.

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

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.

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.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

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

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.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

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.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... 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.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

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

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

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 anymore than for pride or fear.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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.

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

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

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

Złudzeniami można żyć dość długo i być dość szczęśliwym. Może to nawet jedyny sposób, żeby być szczęśliwym. To znaczy, kiedy się jest Polakiem i nie umie się nic prócz zakładania dynamitu pięćset stóp pod ziemią.

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.

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

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.

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.

Civilization begins with distillation

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

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.

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.

... 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.

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

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

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.

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

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

I give it (grandfather's watch) 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.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

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

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.

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.

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

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

It's a comfortable thing, music is.

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.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

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