William Faulkner Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about William Faulkner
William Faulkner Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational William Faulkner quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
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
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 criticismunless 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
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
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
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
