William Faulkner

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

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.

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.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

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.

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

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.

Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

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

Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.

People need trouble a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on toughen it.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

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

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

It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.

Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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

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

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decline to accept the end of man.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.

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

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

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.

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.

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

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

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

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.

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

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

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.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

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.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

Given a choice between grief and nothing Id choose grief.

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.

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

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.

A gentleman can live through anything.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid.

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

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

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

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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

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

The salvation of the world is in mans suffering.

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.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

The saddest thing about love is that not only that it cannot last forever but that heartbreak is soon forgotten.