William Faulkner Quotes

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

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.

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

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.

It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.

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.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

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.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

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