William Faulkner Quotes

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

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

I decline to accept the end of man.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

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

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

The artist must be a psychologist but he must also be a philosopher.

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

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.

The man who removed the mountain began by carrying away small stones.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.

The only thing that never failed to make life worth living…was love.

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.

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.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.

William Faulkner Quotes part 2

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

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

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

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

No man is a failure who is enjoying life.

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

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

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.

The man who says ‘I am not a writer’ is someone who has written no more than his conditions of life.

The poet’s, novelist’s, the playwright’s work is to lift up people’s eyes, open their doors, blow the trumpet and say, ‘Listen, listen! It’s going to be forever.’

I decline to accept the end of man.

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

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

Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.

When you have to pick between choosing a side and truth, choose the truth.

The only good artist is a dead artist because only then can you believe in their sincerity.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

It is the writer’s privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

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.

The only thing I’m afraid of is time.

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

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.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot, blind earth.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.

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.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

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

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

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

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