William Faulkner Quotes

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

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

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

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

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

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

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

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

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.

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.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

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

The writer's only responsibility is to his art...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.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Civilization begins with distillation

Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

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

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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...

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.

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

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

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.

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

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...nor make love for eight hours...

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.