Famous William Faulkner Quotations

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"The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it."
by William Faulkner
"Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
by William Faulkner
"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
by William Faulkner
"A gentleman can live through anything."
by William Faulkner
"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."
by William Faulkner
"Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
by William Faulkner
"Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint 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."
by William Faulkner
"Business is always interfering with pleasure, but it makes other pleasures possible."
by William Faulkner
"He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
by William Faulkner
"Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
by William Faulkner
"I believe that man will not merely endure he will prevail."
by William Faulkner
"I decline to accept the end of man."
by William Faulkner
"I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are."
by William Faulkner
"I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone."
by William Faulkner
"If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."
by William Faulkner
"It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget."
by William Faulkner
"No man is a failure who is enjoying life."
by William Faulkner
"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes him or herself a better human being than their nature wants to be, if they followed their nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race."
by William Faulkner
"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race."
by William Faulkner
"Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, Not because they never found it, But because they didn't stop to enjoy it."
by William Faulkner
"Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing."
by William Faulkner
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."
by William Faulkner
"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."
by William Faulkner
"The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement"
by William Faulkner
"The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business"
by William Faulkner
"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
by William Faulkner
"We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job."
by William Faulkner
"Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find."
by William Faulkner
"Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat."
by William Faulkner
"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."
by William Faulkner
"People between 20 and 40 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 40. Between 20 and 40 the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not yet begun 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 20 and 40."
by William Faulkner
"If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t."
by William Faulkner
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
by William Faulkner
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."
by William Faulkner
"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky."
by William Faulkner
"If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us."
by William Faulkner
"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."
by William Faulkner
"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
by William Faulkner
"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong 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. I refuse to accept this. 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. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 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."
by 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."
by William Faulkner
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."
by William Faulkner
"People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy."
by William Faulkner
"Maybe it was because like not only finds like; it can't even escape from being found by its like. Even when it's just like in one thing, because even them two with the same like was different."
by William Faulkner
"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."
by 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."
by William Faulkner
"The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey."
by 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."
by William Faulkner
"The salvation of the world is in man's suffering."
by William Faulkner
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a strang..."
by William Faulkner
"This was Pharaoh, direct descendent of our deity Amon, god of the sun, who rules the heavens as Pharaoh rules the earth. Again, he brought tre..."
by William Faulkner


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