William Faulkner Quotes

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

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...

... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

You know that 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.

...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...

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

now i can get them teeth

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.

And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism--unless the criticized isn't within earshot.

And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.

It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

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

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingway

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

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

Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs

Too much happens ... Man performs engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

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.

Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.

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

When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't.

The past is never dead-it is not even past.

One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours.

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.