William Faulkner Quotes

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

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

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

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

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.

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.

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash. Your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them.

I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them; you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

Home again, his native land; he was born of it and his bones will sleep in it . . .

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.

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.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

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

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express . . . but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure must would have done better.

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books, . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now that you don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.