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
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
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
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Generations
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Dreams
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
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
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers
Maybe it was because like not only finds like; it can’t even escape from being found by its like. Even when it’s just like in one thing, because even them two with the same like was different.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Perception
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: Past, Reflection, Memory
The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Art, Literature, Books
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Facts
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: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Art, Authors & Writing, Writing
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong 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. I refuse to accept this. 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. 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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Soul
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Grief
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Art
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.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Trouble, Difficulty
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Time Management
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
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: Art, Arts, Artists
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writing
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: Quarrels, Fight, Fighting
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
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
Topics: Adversity, Ability
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: Mankind, Man
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
The sacred lamp of day
Now dipt in western clouds his parting day.
—William Faulkner
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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