William Faulkner Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

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
I decline to accept the end of man.… 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
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail.

William Faulkner
Why do you hate the South?
I dont hate it.... I dont hate it.... I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

William Faulkner
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.

William Faulkner
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner
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
Really the writer doesn't want success.... He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall — Kilroy was here—that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

William Faulkner
There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp. I don't want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

William Faulkner
Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

William Faulkner
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

William Faulkner
We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

William Faulkner
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

William Faulkner
They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

William Faulkner
Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

William Faulkner
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
… a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.

William Faulkner
It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

William Faulkner
Dilsey stroked Ben's head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily.

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

William Faulkner
Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

William Faulkner
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.

William Faulkner
Tell about the South. What's it's like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

William Faulkner
Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.

William Faulkner
Interviewer: Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good novelist?
Faulkner: Ninety-nine percent talent ... ninety-nine percent discipline ... ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done.

William Faulkner