William Faulkner Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
William Faulkner Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A gentleman can live through anything.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
I decline to accept the end of man.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 45
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 46
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 47
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 48
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 49
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 50
Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 51
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 52
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 53
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
- 54
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner | Refcard PDF ↑
