William Faulkner Quotes

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

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

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

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.

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.

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.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.

The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

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.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

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

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

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.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

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

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.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

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

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.

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.

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.

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

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

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

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

I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie

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

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

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.

A gentleman can live through anything.

...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all; and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'

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

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.

...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.