William Faulkner Quotes

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

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

I don't want money badly enough to work for it.

Love doesn't die; the men and women do.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

I decline to accept the end of man.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Who gathers the withered rose?

I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.

The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.

I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.

A gentleman can live through anything.

any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man

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

Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

Idleness breeds our better virtues.

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

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.

I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie

Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.

Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.

Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

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.

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.

It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you

No one individual can tell the truth.

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.