William Faulkner quotes

William Faulkner was an American novelist and short story writer, considered one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. His experimental style and explorations of the American South profoundly influenced modern literature. He remains known for works like "The Sound and the Fury" and for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here are 280 of his quotes:

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

William Faulkner

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

William Faulkner

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

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

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

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.

William Faulkner

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.

William Faulkner

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.

William Faulkner

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

William Faulkner

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

William Faulkner

A gentleman can live through anything.

William Faulkner

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

William Faulkner

Poor man. Poor mankind.

William Faulkner

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

William Faulkner

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

William Faulkner

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -- after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

William Faulkner

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.

William Faulkner

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

William Faulkner

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

William Faulkner

It's not when you realize that nothing can help you religion, pride, anything it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.

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

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

William Faulkner