William Faulkner Quotes

Read, read read. Read everything.

And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.

Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

My, my. A body does get around.

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

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

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

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.

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

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.

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible

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.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers

A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

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.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept 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.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: 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 his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

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

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

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.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

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.

The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.