William Faulkner Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

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

William Faulkner
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

William Faulkner
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

William Faulkner
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which—can supply the lack of the others.

William Faulkner
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

William Faulkner
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

William Faulkner
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

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

William Faulkner
I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

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
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

William Faulkner
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

William Faulkner
People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

William Faulkner
…women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.

William Faulkner
Ah don't believe Ah know which pictures are yours. Do you make the Mickey Mouse brand?
To Irving Thalberg

William Faulkner
Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.

William Faulkner
The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

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

William Faulkner
The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.

William Faulkner
Some folks wouldn't even speak when they passed me on the street. Then MGM came to town to film Intruder in the Dust, and that made some difference because I'd brought money into Oxford. But it wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand thirty thousand dollars.

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

William Faulkner
The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

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

William Faulkner
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

William Faulkner