William faulkner quotes

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

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.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

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

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

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

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

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

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

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

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

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.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

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.

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.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. 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.

Civilization begins with distillation

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.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

Try to be better than yourself.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Who gathers the withered rose?

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

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.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

History is not was, it is.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

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

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

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

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.

God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.

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.

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

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

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.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

No one individual can tell the truth.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

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

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

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.

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.

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

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

She was the captain of her soul

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.

Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

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.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

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.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be-curiosity-to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

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

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

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

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

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.

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.

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.

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

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

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.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

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.

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...

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

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

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.

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.

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