William Faulkner Quotes

354 quotes in 3306 categories

• You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know…
• They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men…
• The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
• 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.
• There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until…
• The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
• Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white…
• Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
• 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…
• My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
• Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
• People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.
• We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free…
• Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
• If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
• I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you…
• 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,…
• Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
• Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's…
• The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

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