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
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
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
– William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
– William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
– William Faulkner
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest.
– William Faulkner
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
– William Faulkner
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
– William Faulkner
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.
– William Faulkner
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
– William Faulkner
Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
– William Faulkner
I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.
– William Faulkner
I am not one of those women who can stand things.
– William Faulkner
No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
– William Faulkner
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
– William Faulkner
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
– William Faulkner
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
– William Faulkner
Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.
– William Faulkner
Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.
– William Faulkner
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
– William Faulkner
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
– William Faulkner
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
– William Faulkner
And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.
– William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner
Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.
– William Faulkner
I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.
– William Faulkner
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
– William Faulkner
The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
– William Faulkner
Perhaps love cannot live anywhere but books.
– William Faulkner
The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
– William Faulkner
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
– William Faulkner
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.
– William Faulkner
Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
– William Faulkner
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
– William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
– William Faulkner
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
– William Faulkner
Making or getting money is a kind of game where there are not any rules at all.
– William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
– William Faulkner
Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.
– William Faulkner
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
– William Faulkner
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
– William Faulkner
She was the captain of her soul.
– William Faulkner
The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
-William Faulkner
No one individual can tell the truth.
– William Faulkner
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
– William Faulkner
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
– William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
– William Faulkner
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
– William Faulkner
We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
– William Faulkner
The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.
-William Faulkner
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
– William Faulkner
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
– William Faulkner