William Faulkner
145 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."
"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."
"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."
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
"The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten."
"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."
"If a story is in you, it has to come out."
"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
"She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it."
"You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults."
"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."
"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
"The best fiction is far more true than any journalism."
"If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can."
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."
"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."
"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."
"You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it."
"The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. ... "Man was not made to sweat." "That's so. See what it has done to their flesh." "Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too." "You have eaten of it?" "Once." ... Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles ... there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly ... "We cannot eat them," one said. "Why not?" "There are too many of them." "That's true," a third said. "Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man." ... "It means work," the third said. "Let the Negroes do it," the first said. ... "Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating.""
"For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid... and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy."
"Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be."
"It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this<!-- , not as a class or classes, but --> ... as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it."