William Faulkner famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
-- William Faulkner -
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
-- 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 -
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 -
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.
-- 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 -
You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.
-- William Faulkner -
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest
-- William Faulkner -
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
-- William Faulkner -
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
-- William Faulkner -
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
-- William Faulkner -
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
-- William Faulkner -
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
-- William Faulkner -
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
-- William Faulkner -
So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
-- 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 -
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 -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
-- William Faulkner -
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
-- William Faulkner -
I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
-- William Faulkner -
An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
-- William Faulkner -
No man can write who is not first a humanitarian
-- William Faulkner -
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
-- William Faulkner -
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
-- William Faulkner -
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
-- William Faulkner -
Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
-- William Faulkner -
We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.
-- William Faulkner -
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
-- William Faulkner -
Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
-- 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 -
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 -
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
-- William Faulkner -
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
-- William Faulkner -
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
-- 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 -
They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph
-- William Faulkner -
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
-- William Faulkner -
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. 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.
-- William Faulkner -
It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
-- William Faulkner -
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...
-- William Faulkner -
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
-- William Faulkner -
History is not was, it is.
-- William Faulkner -
Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.
-- William Faulkner -
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
-- William Faulkner -
Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
-- William Faulkner -
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- 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 -
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
-- William Faulkner -
All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.
-- William Faulkner -
When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.
-- William Faulkner -
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
-- William Faulkner -
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
-- William Faulkner -
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
-- William Faulkner -
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
-- William Faulkner -
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
-- William Faulkner -
...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
-- William Faulkner -
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
-- William Faulkner -
The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.
-- 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 -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
-- 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...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 -
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
-- William Faulkner -
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
-- William Faulkner -
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 -
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 immotality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artists way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
-- William Faulkner -
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
-- William Faulkner -
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
-- William Faulkner -
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
-- William Faulkner -
any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man
-- William Faulkner -
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
-- William Faulkner -
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
-- William Faulkner -
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
-- William Faulkner -
Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words
-- William Faulkner -
Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
-- William Faulkner -
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
-- William Faulkner -
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
-- 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 -
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
-- William Faulkner -
Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
-- William Faulkner -
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.
-- William Faulkner -
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
-- William Faulkner -
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
-- William Faulkner -
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 any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
-- 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 -
Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.

-- William Faulkner -
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
-- William Faulkner
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