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William Faulkner

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Quotes
86

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
William Faulkner
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William Faulkner
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
William Faulkner
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
William Faulkner
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
William Faulkner
Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.
William Faulkner
People need trouble a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on toughen it.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
William Faulkner
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
William Faulkner
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
William Faulkner
I've got to feel the pencil and see the words at the end of the pencil.
William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
William Faulkner
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
William Faulkner
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner
I decline to accept the end of man.
William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
William Faulkner
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
William Faulkner
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner
Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
William Faulkner
Given a choice between grief and nothing Id choose grief.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
A gentleman can live through anything.
William Faulkner
And sure enough even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.
William Faulkner
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
William Faulkner
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
The salvation of the world is in mans suffering.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
William Faulkner
The saddest thing about love is that not only that it cannot last forever but that heartbreak is soon forgotten.
William Faulkner

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