William Faulkner Quotes (188 Quotes)

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.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

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

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.

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

I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.

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.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

A gentleman can live through anything.

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 past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

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.

They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them improvidence and intemperance and evasion -- not laziness evasion of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

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. See other Poets Writers.

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

He the writer must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets Writers.

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.

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

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

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

Landlord of a bordello The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes him or herself a better human being than their nature wants to be, if they followed their nature only. Whatever its symbol -- cross or crescent or whatever -- that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

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.

I'm glad I haven't got the sort of conscience I've got to nurse like a sick puppy all the time.

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

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end the fundamentalists, the beginning when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

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.

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.

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

My mother is a fish.

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

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.