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 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: Fighting, Fight, Quarrels
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
Topics: Racism
The sacred lamp of day
Now dipt in western clouds his parting day.
—William Faulkner
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
Do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known, when the disgrace is, that the thing should exist.
—William Faulkner
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: Optimism, Kindness
A gentleman can live through anything.
—William Faulkner
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Art, Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Gratitude
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
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: Time Management, Adversity, Time
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers
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
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
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Work
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Patience
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Dreams
If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: America
All of us have failed to reach our dream of perfection, so I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Perfection, Failure, Fail, Mistake, Dream, Perfect
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
—William Faulkner
Topics: 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
When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Simplicity
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
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: Reading, Books, Literature
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Writers, Writing, Reading, Authors & Writing, Books
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
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
—William Faulkner
Topics: Suffering
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 Novelist
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