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
[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself. - William Faulkner
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to. - William Faulkner
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. - William Faulkner
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good. - William Faulkner
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. - 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
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
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it. - William Faulkner
The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. - William Faulkner
No man can write who is not first a humanitarian - William Faulkner
He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land. - William Faulkner
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. - William Faulkner
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. - William Faulkner
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. - William Faulkner
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing. - William Faulkner
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies. - William Faulkner
Civilization begins with distillation - William Faulkner
The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. - William Faulkner
You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything. - William Faulkner
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. - William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible. - William Faulkner
Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks. - William Faulkner
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met. - 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
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. - William Faulkner
In writing, you must kill all your darlings. - William Faulkner
Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time. - William Faulkner
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
If a story is in you, it has to come out. - William Faulkner
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
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better. - William Faulkner
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. - William Faulkner
now i can get them teeth - William Faulkner
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough. - William Faulkner
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest - William Faulkner
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice... - William Faulkner
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
My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all? - William Faulkner
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely. - William Faulkner
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. - William Faulkner
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean. - William Faulkner
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain) - 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
Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact. - William Faulkner
Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. - William Faulkner
When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar. - William Faulkner
It's a comfortable thing, music is. - William Faulkner
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults. - William Faulkner
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. - 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
Don't try to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. - William Faulkner
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. - William Faulkner