William Faulkner Quotes

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

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.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Te...

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any num...

Well, Bud, he said, looking at me, I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered tak...

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and create...

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally...

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is j...

I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for t...