William Faulkner Quotes

William Faulkner Biography
Type: Novelist
Nationality: American
Born: September 25, 1897
Died: July 6, 1962


A gentleman can live through anything.
William Faulkner

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

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
William Faulkner

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

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
William Faulkner

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner

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

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
William Faulkner

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner

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

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
William Faulkner

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner

I decline to accept the end of man.
William Faulkner

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William Faulkner

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
William Faulkner

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner

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 music would have done better.
William Faulkner