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Quotes by William Faulkner

A gentleman can live through anything.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
– William Faulkner
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we callwhat he writes fiction.
– William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
– William Faulkner
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.
– 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
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
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
– William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
– William Faulkner
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
– William Faulkner
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
I decline to accept the end of man.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
– William Faulkner
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
– William Faulkner
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
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
– William Faulkner
It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.
– William Faulkner
It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
– 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
Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
– William Faulkner
Others have done it before me. I can, too.
– William Faulkner
Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.
– 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 is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.
– 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
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
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.
– William Faulkner
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
– 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
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
– William Faulkner
The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.
– William Faulkner
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
– William Faulkner
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
– 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
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
– 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
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
– William Faulkner
Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.
– William Faulkner
…when Father gave it to me he said 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 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