William Faulkner Quotes - Page 9

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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

William Faulkner

Regret, Habit, Idle

William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.79, Modern Library

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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

William Faulkner

Writing, Long, Littles

Francis Lee Utley, William Faulkner, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney (1964). “Bear, man, & God: seven approaches to William Faulkner's The bear”

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Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

William Faulkner

Men, Dust, Desire

William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.126, Modern Library

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I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

William Faulkner

Inspiration, Saws, Heard

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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

William Faulkner

God, Dream, Men

William Faulkner, Paul Gardner, Eric Mottram (1976). “A Faulkner perspective: a companion-guide to the limited first edition of the Selected letters of William Faulkner”

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

William Faulkner

Loneliness

William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

Moving, Reality, Bereavement

William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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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

Running, Distance, Space

William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.

William Faulkner

Thinking, Giving, Promise

William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.101, W. W. Norton & Company

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...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

William Faulkner

Thinking, Two, People

William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

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The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner

Believe, Artist, Vanity

"William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

William Faulkner

Writing, Ideas, Simplicity

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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.

William Faulkner

Men, Doctors, Cyclones

William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

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Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words

William Faulkner

People, And Love, Sound

William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

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It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.

William Faulkner

Running, Husband, College

William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.125, W. W. Norton & Company

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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

William Faulkner

Men, Rocks, Talking

Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, originally delivered December 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

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It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.

William Faulkner

Ambition, Leaving, Individual

William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). “Selected letters of William Faulkner”, Vintage

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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.

William Faulkner

Church, Inward, Bells

William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

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They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph

William Faulkner

Beach, Ocean, Names

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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

Moving, Writing, Character

William Faulkner, Joseph L. Fant, Robert Paul Ashley (1964). “Faulkner at West Point”, p.101, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

William Faulkner

Men, Dolls, Sawdust

William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.172, Modern Library

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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

William Faulkner

Ideas, Style, Should

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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.

William Faulkner

Sleep, Rooms, Strange

William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

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I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.

William Faulkner

Life, Thinking, People

William Faulkner (1955). “Mosquitoes”, New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation

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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

William Faulkner

Taken, Thinking, Together

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Born: September 25, 1897
Died: July 6, 1962
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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