William Faulkner quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William Faulkner

William Faulkner Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William Faulkner on Wise Famous Quotes.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

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

It's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.
(on Mark Twain)

Civilization begins with distillation

She was the captain of her soul

No one individual can tell the truth.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.

A gentleman can live through anything.

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.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

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

Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.

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

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

It takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing,

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

No man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

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.

What modren ideas?" pap said. "I didn't know there was but one idea about work - until it is done, it ain't done, and when it is done, it is.

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

And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.

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!

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.

You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

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

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

The woman is now climbing slowly down, with that inwardlistening deliberation.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

And Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

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.

[The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

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. And

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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.

Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs

A man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

God is foolish at times, but at least He's a gentleman. Dont you know that?" "I always thought of Him as a man," the woman said.

History is not was, it is.

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.

I made it on the bevel.

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.

now i can get them teeth

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

It does last," Horace said. "Spring does. You'd almost think there was some purpose to it.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

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

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.

Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.

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

In writing, you must kill your darlings.

The two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia.

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

You're not being tried by common sense," Horace said. "You're being tried by a jury.

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

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

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

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

I says to myself it's a good thing her eyes are giving out,

Folks are funny. They can't stick to one way of thinking or doing anything unless they get a new reason for doing it ever so often.

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

She looked at me then everything emptied out of her eyes and they looked like the eyes in statues blank and unseeing and serene put

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.

To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.

Idleness breeds our better virtues.

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

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...

I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil,

Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

Let the past abolish the past when
and if
it can substitute something better.

Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

It was just public opinion in an acute state of indigestion.

Man the sum of his climatic experiences

Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.