Top 100 Quotes About William Faulkner
#1. William Faulkner said, "The only story worth telling is that of the human mind in conflict with itself".
Miles Skedsvold
#2. If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.
Dave Barry
#3. It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did [Ernst] Hemingway and [William] Faulkner - and they're all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time.
Gena Rowlands
#4. I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
#5. My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.
Antonya Nelson
#6. Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
John Updike
#7. Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.
(William Faulkner)
William Faulkner
#8. I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
John Grisham
#9. because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
Ralph Ellison
#10. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Frances Mayes
#11. William Faulkner is supposed to have said, "Civilization begins with distillation," but I'd push even further -- beyond just distilled spirits to wine, beer, mead, sake ... all of it. Booze is civilization in a glass.
Adam Rogers
#12. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. - William Faulkner
Tim Powers
#13. Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism ...
Hunter S. Thompson
#14. Patricia: Do you know William Faulkner?
Michel: No. Who's he? Have you slept with him?
Jean-Luc Godard
#15. In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner's early novels.
Laurence Yep
#16. The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.
Alexandra Adornetto
#17. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Jennifer Haigh
#18. I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
Jay Parini
#19. Only a fool trys to outsmart smart people, and anyone that trys to fool fools is himself already one.
~William Faulkner~
William Faulkner
#20. Memphis can be thought of connected as much to Mississippi and Arkansas as it is to Tennessee, if not more so. William Faulkner once observed that Mississippi extends from a Memphis hotel room to the Gulf of Mexico.
Tav Falco
#21. I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
Ken Burns
#22. I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!
Candy Crowley
#23. My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora's a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.
William Faulkner
#25. Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
#26. We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
William Faulkner
#27. What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.
William Faulkner
#28. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#30. If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it ...
William Faulkner
#31. Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
#32. There is no such thing as was - only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.
William Faulkner
#34. He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
William Faulkner
#35. A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
William Faulkner
#36. That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
William Faulkner
#37. It's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.
William Faulkner
#38. There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.
William Faulkner
#39. A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
William Faulkner
#40. If you got something outside the common run that's got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances.
William Faulkner
#42. When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
William Faulkner
#43. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
William Faulkner
#45. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#46. The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
William Faulkner
#47. When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
William Faulkner
#48. The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.
William Faulkner
#49. I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp.
William Faulkner
#50. The woman went on. She had not looked back. She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried, and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself. She walked out of their talking too; perhaps out of their minds too.
William Faulkner
#52. War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
William Faulkner
#53. [] no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if he were ...
William Faulkner
#54. He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them.
William Faulkner
#55. And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
#56. Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.
William Faulkner
#57. Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
#58. Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while ...
William Faulkner
#59. To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
William Faulkner
#60. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
William Faulkner
#61. [The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117
William Faulkner
#63. Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
William Faulkner
#64. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.
William Faulkner
#66. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner
#67. The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
William Faulkner
#70. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
William Faulkner
#72. It was hot; heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality, a quality of living and palpitant chiaroscuro.
William Faulkner
#73. The woman is now climbing slowly down, with that inwardlistening deliberation.
William Faulkner
#74. Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
William Faulkner
#76. It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
William Faulkner
#77. The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.
William Faulkner
#78. Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.
William Faulkner
#79. The young girl who slept waking in some suspension so completely physical as to resemble the state before birth and as far removed from reality's other extreme as Ellen was from hers
William Faulkner
#80. I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And
William Faulkner
#81. It's a curious thing how no matter what's wrong with you, a man'll tell you to have your teeth examined and a woman'll tell you to get married.
William Faulkner
#82. Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.
William Faulkner
#83. It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
William Faulkner
#84. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
William Faulkner
#85. From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.
William Faulkner
#86. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
#87. Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?
William Faulkner
#89. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.
William Faulkner
#91. There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.
William Faulkner
#92. Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
William Faulkner
#93. Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
William Faulkner
#94. Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
William Faulkner
#95. In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
William Faulkner
#96. Only a fool tries to outsmart smart people, and anyone that tries to fool fools is himself already one.
William Faulkner
#97. She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
William Faulkner
#98. Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
#99. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep.
William Faulkner
#100. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner
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