William Faulkner Quotations

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

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 eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Nicknames are vulgar. Only common people use them.

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

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and selfrespect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express . . . but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure must would have done better.

I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.

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

Well, it's like this. I ain't got to but I can't help it.

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.

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

Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.

The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure

There is no such thing as was -- only is.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Some things you must always be unable to bear.

Even at sixty-two, I can still go harder and further and longer than some of the others. That is, I seem to have reached the point where all I have to risk is just my bones.

The past is never forgotten; it's never even past

And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.

A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven "sure-fire" literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

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.

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

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

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

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

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.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

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

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

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

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

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.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

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

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Civilization begins with distillation

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

You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.

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.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

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.

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. Since man is mortal, the only immotality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artists way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

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.

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

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

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

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

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.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.

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

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

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

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

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

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.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

History is not was, it is.

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

I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized

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

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.

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.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

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

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.

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

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

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

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.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.

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