William Faulkner Quotes

All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.

Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

I will never lie again.

...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.

True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.

She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

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

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.

People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.

It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

I listen to the voices.

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.

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.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

My, my. A body does get around.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.