William Faulkner Quotes

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

Beautiful lives women live — women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts — of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair — move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt.

I don't mean a 1905 Republican — -I don't know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any — -I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.

[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.

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.

You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.

"She’s a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I’m tired."

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

...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.

Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

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...

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.