William Faulkner Quotes

239 Sourced 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
For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid… and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.

William Faulkner
Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

William Faulkner
Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.

William Faulkner
Or maybe married men don't even need reasons, being as they already got wives. Or maybe it's women that don't need reasons, for the simple reason that they never heard of a reason and wouldn't recognize it face to face, since they don't function from reasons but from necessities that couldn't nobody help nohow and that don't nobody but a fool man want to help in the second place, because he don't know no better; it ain't women, it's men that takes ignorance seriously, getting into a skeer [scare] over something for no more reason than that they don't happen to know what it is.

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

William Faulkner
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.

William Faulkner
We never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we would ever be brought to this, did we? You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough even to accept your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.

William Faulkner
They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the one that dies.

William Faulkner
He will need to be just a little bigger than smart, and a little braver than either.

William Faulkner
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

William Faulkner
If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it...

William Faulkner
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

William Faulkner
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...

William Faulkner
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. 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
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
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

William Faulkner
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

William Faulkner
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

William Faulkner