Faulkner, William (William Faulkner)

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

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.
-- William Faulkner

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal 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. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
-- William Faulkner

A gentleman can live through anything.
-- William Faulkner

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

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
-- William Faulkner

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
-- William Faulkner

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
-- 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

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

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

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
-- William Faulkner

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.
-- William Faulkner

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
-- 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

People need trouble
-- William Faulkner

Read, read, read. Read everything
-- William Faulkner

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
-- 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

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
-- William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
-- William Faulkner

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