William Faulkner Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about William Faulkner

William Faulkner Quotes & Sayings

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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

The grass was buzzing in the moonlight where my shadow walked on the grass. — William Faulkner

Civilization begins with distillation — William Faulkner

In a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. — William Faulkner

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

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world. — William Faulkner

Truth is one. It doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart - honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love. — William Faulkner

If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date. — William Faulkner

Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint. — William Faulkner

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. — William Faulkner

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence. — William Faulkner

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

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it. — William Faulkner

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write. — William Faulkner

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

I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65. — William Faulkner

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love. — William Faulkner

He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. — William Faulkner

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism
unless the criticized isn't within earshot. — William Faulkner

But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off? — William Faulkner

And i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was — William Faulkner

Every writer must learn to kill his little darlings. — 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

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning. — William Faulkner

That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events. — William Faulkner

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

I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up — William Faulkner

Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon. — William Faulkner

If you write something that you love beyond all reason, it is wrong and you should strike it out. — William Faulkner

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

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period. — William Faulkner

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

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written. — William Faulkner

Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride. — William Faulkner

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you — William Faulkner

Love doesn't die; the men and women do. — William Faulkner

He lived out there, eight miles from any neighbor, in a masculine solitude in what might be called the half-acre gunroom of a baronial splendor. — William Faulkner

I will never lie again. — William Faulkner

Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him? — Jean-Luc Godard

because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. — Ralph Ellison

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

Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he dont like to admit it to them until they have beards. — William Faulkner

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick! — Candy Crowley

There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others. — William Faulkner

The past is never dead. It's not even past. — William Faulkner

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

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. — William Faulkner

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism ... — Hunter S. Thompson

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past. — William Faulkner

I could still see the smoke stack. That's where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes. — William Faulkner

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure. — William Faulkner

now i can get them teeth — William Faulkner

You have to write badly in order to write well. — William Faulkner

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do. — William Faulkner

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true. — William Faulkner

I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him. — William Faulkner

Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own. — 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

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too. — William Faulkner

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest — William Faulkner

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi — William Faulkner

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town — William Faulkner

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. — 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

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

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't. — William Faulkner

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it. — William Faulkner

Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while ... — William Faulkner

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. — William Faulkner

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world. — William Faulkner

I listen to the voices. — 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

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. — William Faulkner

In writing, you must kill all your darlings. — William Faulkner

You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be. — William Faulkner

Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die. — William Faulkner

He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them. — William Faulkner

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

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it. — William Faulkner

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. — Ken Burns

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another? — William Faulkner

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward. — William Faulkner

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. — William Faulkner

Liquor teaches you to confuse the means with the end — William Faulkner

Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were. — William Faulkner

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief. — William Faulkner

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. — William Faulkner

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible. — William Faulkner

Who gathers the withered rose? — William Faulkner

How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. — William Faulkner

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

In writing, you must kill your darlings. — William Faulkner

The listening part is afraid that there may not be time to say it. Dewey Dell - As I Lay Dying. — William Faulkner

...Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat... — William Faulkner

The two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia. — 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

Escaped at last into a world of pure illusion in which, safe from any harm, she moved, lived, from attitude to attitude — William Faulkner

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame. — William Faulkner

I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone. — William Faulkner

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. — William Faulkner