Top 15 William Faulkner Quotes

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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

...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

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

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

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