William Faulkner Quotes

Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

Caddy smelled like trees.

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

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.

You can't. You just have to.

Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?

We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!

The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

Did you ever have a sister? did you?

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all; and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'

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.

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.

Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

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

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.

Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here, ' on the last wall of the universe.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

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

Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.

Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.