| "I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books." William Faulkner |
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| . . . 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 forgot the words . . . William Faulkner |
| A gentleman can live through anything. William Faulkner Sayings |
| A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven "sure-fire" literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy. 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 writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. William Faulkner |
| A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. 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 Quotations |
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| All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. William Faulkner Popular Quotes |
| 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 Sayings |
| Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Faulkner Remarks |
| 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 |
| Business is always interfering with pleasure, but it makes other pleasures possible. William Faulkner |
| Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Faulkner Quotes |
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner Remarks |
| Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other. William Faulkner Quotes |
| 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, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.... William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust William Faulkner |
| Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain 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 Sayings |
| He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met William Faulkner Adages |
| Home again, his native land; he was born of it and his bones will sleep in it . . . William Faulkner Popular Quotes |
| How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. William Faulkner Remarks |
| 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 believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. William Faulkner Quotes |
| I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. William Faulkner Sayings |
| 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. William Faulkner Remarks |
| 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 |
| I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it. William Faulkner |
| I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it. William Faulkner |
| I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing. William Faulkner |
| I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from. William Faulkner |
| I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. William Faulkner Sayings |
| 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 |
| I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone. William Faulkner |
| I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil. 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 Quotations |
| 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 |
| If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs. William Faulkner |
| It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget. William Faulkner Sayings |
| 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. William Faulkner Quotes |
| 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 Sayings |
| Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now that you don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults. William Faulkner |
| Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing. William Faulkner Quotations |
| 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 |
| Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. William Faulkner Popular Quotes |
| Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico William Faulkner Remarks |
| No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors. William Faulkner Remarks |
| No man is a failure who is enjoying life. William Faulkner |
| No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes him or herself a better human being than their nature wants to be, if they followed their 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 |
| 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 Sayings |
| People between 20 and 40 are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do-after 40. Between 20 and 40 the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not yet begun to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between 20 and 40. William Faulkner |
| 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. William Faulkner Quotations |
| Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else. William Faulkner Remarks |
| Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, Not because they never found it, But because they didn't stop to enjoy it. William Faulkner Adages |
| Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant. William Faulkner Quotations |
| Poor man. Poor mankind. 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 |
| Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing. William Faulkner |
| Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go. William Faulkner Adages |
| 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 end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it. William Faulkner Quotes |
| 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 Quotes |
| The past is never dead, it is not even past. William Faulkner Sayings |
| The past is never dead. It's not even past. William Faulkner |
| The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. William Faulkner |
| The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business William Faulkner |
| The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure 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. William Faulkner Popular Quotes |
| The young man or woman writing today has forgotten 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 Quotes |
| To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi William Faulkner Quotations |
| We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job. William Faulkner Sayings |
| We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid William Faulkner Remarks |
| We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. 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 |
| Well, it's like this. I ain't got to but I can't help it. 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 |
| “... 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 |
