Top 382 Quotes & Sayings by William Faulkner - Page 2

Try to be better than yourself.

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.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

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

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.

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

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

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

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

Who gathers the withered rose?

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

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

She was the captain of her soul

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

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

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

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

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

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

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

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

No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

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

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

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.

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.

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

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

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

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

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

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

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

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.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

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.

...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

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

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

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.

The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose 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. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.

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.

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.

Read, read read. Read everything.