William Faulkner Quotes: 21

• 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.

  The Wild Palms

• 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.

  The Sound and the Fury

• 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.

  The Town

• 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.

  Absalom, Absalom!

• Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

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

• 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.

  As I Lay Dying

• 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.

  Intruder in the Dust