Do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known, when the disgrace is, that the thing should exist.
—William Faulkner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Ability
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
Topics: Horses
The great weight of the ship may indeed prevent her from acquiring her greatest velocity; but when she has attained it, she will advance by her own intrinsic motion, without gaining any new degree of velocity, or lessening what she has acquired.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Weight
I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of kindness and compassion.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Kindness, Optimism
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Experience, Pain
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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 is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Literature, Reading, Books
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Facts
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Perfection, Possibilities, Failures, Dreams, Mistakes, Failure
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing, Art, Writers, Authors & Writing
People between 20 and 40 are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do-after 40. Between 20 and 40 the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not yet begun to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between 20 and 40.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Age
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don’t really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of 11 has not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it. His ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Virtue
Be scared. You cant help that. But don’t be afraid. Aint 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.
—William Faulkner
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Man, Mankind
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
Topics: Adversity, Time Management, Time
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
Topics: Fight, Fighting, Quarrels
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Patience
The past is never dead, it is not even past.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Memory, Reflection, Past
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. 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
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Generations
The sacred lamp of day
Now dipt in western clouds his parting day.
—William Faulkner
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
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
Topics: Conscience
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
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- John Steinbeck American Novelist
- Toni Morrison American Novelist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- William Styron American Novelist
- Pearl S. Buck American Novelist
- Nelson Algren American Writer
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