Quotes by William Faulkner
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion,
which is life, by artificial means and hold
it fixed so that a hundred years later,
when a stranger looks at it, it moves
again since it is life.
~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~
Given a choice between grief and nothing,
I'd choose grief.
~William Faulkner~
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.
~William Faulkner~
Really the writer doesn't want success....
He knows he has a short span of life,
that the day will come when he must pass
through the wall of oblivion, and he wants
to leave a scratch on that wall -- Kilroy was
here -- that somebody a hundred,
or a thousand years later will see.
~William Faulkner~
It is his [the poet's, the writer's] 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~
The writer's only responsibility is to his art.
He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.
He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he
must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride,
decency, security, happiness, all,
to get the book written.
~William Faulkner~
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
~William Faulkner~
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence,
something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the
risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
~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 is good, you'll find out.
If it's not, throw it out the window.
~William Faulkner~
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.
~William Faulkner~
If I had not existed, someone else would have
written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
~William Faulkner~
I'm inclined to think that a military
background wouldn't hurt anyone.
~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~
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