William Faulkner Quotes

In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail

Who gathers the withered rose?

I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.

So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion; against injustice, lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the other thousands of rooms like this one today and tomorrow and next week will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

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 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.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

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 he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

I will never lie again.

No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment.

They killed us, but they ain't whooped us yet.

There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.

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. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

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