Faulkner William Quotes & Sayings

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good. — William Faulkner

The woman is now climbing slowly down, with that inwardlistening deliberation. — William Faulkner

When I look back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you've got to have a tight jar or you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man. — William Faulkner

Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world. — William Faulkner

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner. — Antonya Nelson

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora's a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else. — William Faulkner

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. — William Faulkner

You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. — William Faulkner

He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course. — William Faulkner

It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road. — William Faulkner

He's crossed all the oceans all around the world. — William Faulkner

There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger." "Yes," I said. "Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If it hadn't been for my grandfather, he'd have to work like whitefolks. — William Faulkner

I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior. — William Faulkner

The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound. — William Faulkner

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. — Ken Burns

Making or getting money is a kind of game where there are not any rules at all. — William Faulkner

And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing
that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed
is well nigh overpowering. [ ... ] It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful. — William Faulkner

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. — William Faulkner

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat — William Faulkner

In an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us - children though we were, yet we were descended to literate, town-bred people - it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets we associated with Indians through the hidden and seceret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws ... — William Faulkner

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass _occurences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die. — William Faulkner

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree. — William Faulkner

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it. — William Faulkner

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond. — William Faulkner

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure. — William Faulkner

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow. — William Faulkner

I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself. — William Faulkner

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. — William Faulkner

To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world — William Faulkner

Why yes he thought it ain't a place a man wants to go back to; the place dont even need to be there no more. What aches a man to go back to is what he remembers.
from ... THE MANSION page 106 — William Faulkner

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. — William Faulkner

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. — William Faulkner

Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity. — William Styron

because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. — Ralph Ellison

Hush, now", she said, stroking his head. "Hush. Dilsey got you." But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound. — William Faulkner

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down. — William Faulkner

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless. — William Faulkner

now i can get them teeth — William Faulkner

It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That's it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything. That's it. That's what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything. — William Faulkner

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. — William Faulkner

Ah, Mr Compson said, Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts? — William Faulkner

I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is. — William Faulkner

I could hear my watch whenever the car stopped, but not often they were already eating Who would play a Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat o clock All right I wonder what time it is what of it. — William Faulkner

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world. — William Faulkner

Escaped at last into a world of pure illusion in which, safe from any harm, she moved, lived, from attitude to attitude — William Faulkner

I am not one of those women who can stand things. — William Faulkner

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town — William Faulkner

I don't want money badly enough to work for it. — William Faulkner

He could now see his life opening before him, uncomplex and inescapable as a barren corridor, completely freed now of ever again having to think or decide, the burden which he now assumed and carried as bright and weightless and martial as his insignatory brass: a sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men, and that all that would ever be required of him in payment for this belief, this privilege, would be his own life. — William Faulkner

Memphis can be thought of connected as much to Mississippi and Arkansas as it is to Tennessee, if not more so. William Faulkner once observed that Mississippi extends from a Memphis hotel room to the Gulf of Mexico. — Tav Falco

You tell 'em, big boy; treat 'em rough. — William Faulkner

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind
and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. — William Faulkner

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world ... would do this, it would change the earth. — William Faulkner

But again I dont know. Maybe it didn't take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man's condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise - the penalties, the simple red ink - might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful. — William Faulkner

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I've never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He's too busy writing something. If he isn't first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn't got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. — William Faulkner

Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them. — William Faulkner

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. — William Faulkner

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. — William Faulkner

I made it on the bevel. — William Faulkner

True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth. — William Faulkner

Interviewer: Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
Faulkner: Read it four times. — William Faulkner

Did you ever have a sister? did you? — William Faulkner

She wasn't too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don't know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do. — William Faulkner

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad. — William Faulkner

Which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and, being myriad, one ... — William Faulkner

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. — William Faulkner

Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done — William Faulkner

She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits. — William Faulkner

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it. — William Faulkner

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. — William Faulkner

The only rule I have is to quit while it's still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it's going good. Then it's easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you'll get into a dead spell and you'll have trouble with it. — William Faulkner

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger. — William Faulkner

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

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God. — William Faulkner

In the woods the tree frogs were going smelling rain in the air they sounded like toy music boxes that were hard to turn and the honeysuckle come — William Faulkner

What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas? 'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there. — William Faulkner

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling. — William Faulkner

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get. — William Faulkner

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it ... — William Faulkner

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it. — William Faulkner

Don Quixote - I read that every year, as some do the Bible. — William Faulkner

A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy. — William Faulkner

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love? — William Faulkner

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable
And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks. — William Faulkner

That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again. — William Faulkner

It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ. — William Faulkner

Women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ... — William Faulkner

He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words. — William Faulkner

In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world. — William Faulkner

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief — William Faulkner

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism
unless the criticized isn't within earshot. — William Faulkner

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

Listen to the voices. — William Faulkner

Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit, air they? — William Faulkner

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking; a little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails. — William Faulkner

Battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say 'Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system — William Faulkner

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. 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

I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw. — William Faulkner