William Faulkner Quotes

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

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

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

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 music would have done better.

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

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.

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

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

She was the captain of her soul

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

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.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

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

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

History is not was, it is.

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

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

You have to write badly in order to write well.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words

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

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

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

Try to be better than yourself.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

Read, read read. Read everything.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.

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.

In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

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

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.